You are a consultant for the ABC consulting group. Your firm as been contacted by a XYZ Venture Capital Group which is seeking a consulting outfit to give advise on where ( which companies) it might make a significant investment.

  XYZ has no preference for investing in the service or manufacturing sector but does believe that operational excellence can lead to permanent value creation and superior profit and ROE performance. Because other consulting firms are also bidding on this large consulting project, XYZ has ask your firm to pick any 2 for profit firms from one of the industries listed below and to analyze them from anoperations management perspective. XYZ will then compare your consulting firm's depth and quality of analysis with other consulting outfits to finalize the consulting group. It will then perform an actual investigation.

    XYZ has asked you to address the following in a "white paper", using the outline structure demonstrated below.

    Select 1 of the following industries and then choose 2 companies within the industry you selected: 1. United State steel industry,2. Home movie rental industry,3. Mass-merchandiser retail industry, 4.Fast Food industry,5. United State passenger airline industry,6. Small package delivery industry.

  1. Introduction: Give a brief description of the industry background ( the industry itself not a particular firm). Brief description of the history of each firm of chosen pair, including the market share, sales level and profits for the last 5 years.

  2. Operational objective: Research each firm stated mission statement, Narrow that yourself to an operational objective.

  3. The specific operational challenges of this industry: List and discuss at least 3 challenges.

4.  Metrics of the industry: Research at least 5 operational metrics this industry uses. If you can't find examples to use, describe 5 metrics they should be using. ( exactly how you would gather the data to calculate these metrics).

  5. How as each firm addressed these industries? Identify how each firm has addressed each of the specific industry changellesdescribed in section 3. This section should be written in the language of operations management. It should relate what each firm did to specifics, such as work cell design, learn manufacturing techniques, SPC, quick changeover improvement, line balancing design for manufacturability and supply chain optimization.

  6. Conclusion for this industry pair: Identify which firm is performing better. Specifically identify why, from an operational perspective, the cycle time is better. Also give specifics regarding the lead time, percentage of customer complaints, reduction in waste, whether the inventory is better, customer rentention, and so on. Compare each firms actual financial performance using metrics such as ROE, sales growth rate, inventory turn, and ROA.

7. Applicability elsewhere: To demonstrate to XYZ Venture Capital Group how broadly ABC understands operations management discuss either the applicability of other industries operations management techniques to either of these firms success or explain how the operations management techniques of either of these firms could be applied in other industries.

    word count is 1,750 - 2,000 words cities and References.