Finish The Short Case Discussion Form 2018 In 10 Hours
Cameron Collier
Group A3
November 29, 2018
During the course of the semester I have been interning at a company called Fasthouse; they are a small apparel manufacturer located in the Los Angeles area who caters to the action sports market. The brand was started as a husband/ wife effort. The wife is the brand manager, while the husband acts as the brand’s creative director. Over the course of five years the company has managed to successfully enter an extremely competitive market and siphon off a significant majority of consumer base from action sports apparel giants such as Fox and Thor. This success encouraged me to seek an internship because I was curious of how they were able to achieve this since I have similar aspirations in my future; however, my time there has made me wonder how they ever achieved any success.
I was hired to intern in the apparel production side of the business assisting with tasks such as marker design, which is what I did for the past two months; however, my colleagues and I have recently been pulled into the distribution side of the business to assist with fulfilling orders for our major distribution partners. This has left my manager stretched extremely thin. He is now a one man show who must coordinate with fabric and trim suppliers as well as cutting and sewing contractors in order to produce the design department’s sample line. This work must also be balanced with coordinating the production of duplicated production runs (previous production runs; done to satisfy backordered product) and future production runs. This issue could have been avoided but my manager has constantly been micromanaged by his boss, the brand manager, in order to “save money.”
My manager tried to create a safety stock months ago by ordering our core styles from our vendors in advanced, but the brand manager stopped him since a large shipment of styles was to be delivered from overseas. The problem is that the shipment was expected in early September but wasn’t delivered until early November. This caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in backorders for our e-commerce site and for our distribution network as well. As a result, nearly 75% of our e-commerce sales were lost. Miraculously, only 10% of our distributors canceled their orders (mainly due to a heroic effort by my manager to somehow get product from local vendors in record time). So, the last three weeks has been an all hands-on-deck effort in order to fulfill all the backordered distributor and e-commerce orders. The next issue is the fact that the rate of inventory consumption is significantly higher than anticipated due to unexpected demand caused by the holiday season coupled with the backorder log previously mentioned; furthermore, the brand manager has not approved my manager’s request for the duplicated production run of our core styles which will take another six weeks to be produced. The brand manager feels that we have enough inventory but is failing to consider the unexpected increase in demand and the lead time involved with creating the product.
This act of mismanagement has caused a palpable amount of tension throughout the management team. The distribution manager is frustrated with the production manager since he does not have the product required to fulfill orders. The design team is frustrated with the production manager since he was unable to focus on their needs due to being focused on fixing the backorder mess. My manager is frustrated with the brand manager for micro managing his decisions and the brand manager seems to be overwhelmed with the financing duties of the operation, which is my reasoning for her seemingly backwards decisions.
Alejandra Carrillo
Mgmt 498C, A:3
November 20 ,2018
Short Case
I am currently interning for Safeway Inc a grocery store as a Store Manager. During my internship I have encountered an on-going issue with an employee that calls out of work every week sometimes more than once a week. This employee was transfer from another store to the store I am interning in now from one day to another. Management had no control over the decision made by the district manager. Along with the employee came a history of the employee file. The file was thick, and it contained tremendous amounts of disciplinary action reports for similar issues. As a store manager I was assigned to call this employee into the office to discuss the situation and create a work plan that would help her to show up to work on time and work the posted schedule. This conversation was tough since I was assigned to speak to this individual to implement a plan. My internship duties were to shadow the Store Director and helping him with his daily routine. Once I was delegated this task to speak to the employee to help create a plan to help control the situation was a challenge. I called the employee to the office having the Store Director’s Assistant as a witness. A witness is required to speak to the employee that is protected under a union. During our discussion I stated that we wanted to get to the bottom of the reoccurring issue. The employee apologized and said that they did not mean to cause an inconvenience to the department or the store. Our plan consisted of scheduling this employee different shifts, so they can catch the bus in a timely manner.
After a couple days the behavior continued, and I brought it to my bosses’ attention. My boss did not seem to care and brushed it off as if nothing happened. This employee is protected by the union, but as management we must document it our end in order to hold the employee accountable. The Store Director did not want to deal with this problem that was causing issues in one of the departments. The department was short handed and could not keep up with their work without the other employee. I spoke to my boss and told him that it was not fair that this employee was getting away with such behavior. My boss ignored me, so I figure that it was up to me to deal with the problem. Unfortunately, I was unable to issue a conference memo for failure to work posted schedule because I am only an Intern. Being delegated this task, I felt that like it was my responsibility to take care of the issue, but without my bosses’ approval I felt stuck in the middle.
After my boss ignored my concern I then asked if we could add hours to cover the missing shift. My boss said to leave it alone, so I did and stopped insisting in trying to fix the issue. Later that week I saw the sales report and noticed that we were not doing so good and the store was trending negative. When a store is trending negative it reflects on the projection conducted in the beginning of the week. A projection is basically predicting how much sales your store will generate for that week. I noticed that the store manager had been over projecting the sales to get more hours. It was not a holiday or a busy week to have such a high projection. My boss was using hours to train people in different positions. It is against company policy to play with numbers to get more hours. Shadowing him is part of my duty as an intern and I did not feel comfortable doing something that was against the company policy. I then realized why the Store Director was ignoring my concerns with the employee and why he did not want to go through with the process with HR. At this point I don’t know what to do. Should I whistle blow and tell the district manager? Should I bring it to my bosses’ attention that what he is doing is against company policy? Or should I just pretend that I do not know what is going on since I am only an Intern? The Store Director actions reflected in the store, because everyone’s hours were not accurate, conditions in the store were falling and employees were stressing out.
Lorraine Viera | Group A3
I am currently interning with a marketing company in Los Angeles, the office is small and there a total of 16 people who currently work there. My commute is about 40 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic and I am one of the 3 interns that work on Mondays & Tuesdays. We are given daily tasks of posting events to the main website and then promoting them onto their designated social media. Between me and the other interns, we are given separate categories and we are assigned the tasks via email at the start of the day. All the employees have the same start time but the interns are scheduled to come in 30 minutes before everyone else. We often wait for our supervisor to get settled in and email us the tasks for the day.
Currently, the company doesn’t have a private parking lot, so we park about a block away at a parking garage where we pay $12 a day. We were promised to get those parking fees reimbursed by the company throughout the duration of our internship. The HR Representative, Leah, usually takes the copies of the parking tickets and gives us our reimbursement at the end of the day. About a couple weeks ago she sprained her ankle and was out of the office for a couple days. Consequently, our parking tickets piled up on her desk and were left for her until she returned.
She has now returned from her leave but she is constantly out of the office so she is always behind on returning the reimbursements. I’ve emailed my supervisor Kim about the situation and she said she would email Leah and remind her about the reimbursements. Last Tuesday, Leah was out of the office again so I didn’t receive my reimbursement for that day. Not only did I not receive my reimbursement, but my supervisor was also very busy and didn’t assign me any tasks for the day. I emailed her asking what she needed me to do for the day and she didn’t get back to me until hours later. The communication at the office is primarily via email and everyone often has headphones on so they aren’t very approachable. I not only wasted my time but I also spent money on parking & gas when there wasn’t anything for me to do that day. I don’t know how to approach the situation, whether I should talk to Kim and voice my concerns? Should I talk to Leah and ask about my reimbursements? Or should I go directly to the General Manager, Ben and explain the situation?