Many U. S. firms have moved their manufacturing operations to overseas locations in the past decade. Although there can be sound financial benefits to this choice, moving production overseas can also raise new challenges for operations managers. Identify several of these challenges, and offer suggestions for how operations managers can use the concepts in this chapter to minimize or solve them.

Consumer surplus is: the difference between the price of a product and what consumers were willing to pay for the product. the difference between the discounted price of a product and its retail price. the difference between the price paid by consumers and the price required of producers. the difference between the price of a product and consumers' valuation of the last unit of the product purchased.

The wall street journal reported that walmart stores inc. is planning to lay off 2,300 employees at its sam's club warehouse unit. approximately half of the layoffs will be hourly employees (the wall street journal, january 25-26, 2014). suppose the following data represent the percentage of hourly employees laid off for 15 sam's club stores. 55 56 44 43 44 56 60 62 57 45 36 38 50 69 65 (a) compute the mean and median percentage of hourly employees being laid off at these stores. (b) compute the first and third quartiles. (c) compute the range and interquartile range. (d) compute the variance and standard deviation. (e) do the data contain any outliers? (f) based on the sample data, does it appear that walmart is meeting its goal for reducing the number of hourly employees?

Harmon inc. produces joint products l, m, and n from a joint process. information concerning a batch produced in may at a joint cost of $75,000 was as follows: