Goods and Service Design

The primary goods produced by the Chocolicious division are chocolates and chips. The chocolates comes in different shapes and are packed in different ways. The cooking of the chocolates is standardized. There are recipes for each variety and each recipe is strictly followed. According to the manager it is standardized to avoid high amount of spoilage. The chocolates also come in different varieties like minted chocolates, chocolates mixed with little alcohol, dark chocolates and etc. Moreover, there is only one person who is tasked to cook the chocolate and such person is specialized in her work. The chocolates are then poured in a molder with different designs. These chocolates are then frozen in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes. After which they are packed in different packages. Each type of packaging contains different measurement of chocolates. For example, chocolate kisses are measured by pieces, while bars are measured in grams. The packaging is hand made. The chocolates are packed manually. The packaging comes in different designs. There are those chocolates that are packed in a way that it is suitable to be given as a gift, like chocolate bouquets, gift packaging design and so on. There are also those packages which are simple. The chocolates that are for retail are packed in a simple manner to enable mass production. The packaging is usually in the form of plastic containers and boxes. Chocolicious division also caters special orders like chocolates with specifications as to the percentage of its darkness and chocolates that are personally designed as to shape and packaging. Chocolicious also produces dark unsweetened chocolates commonly known as “tableya”. The tableya is made up of fermented beans. The tableya produced must have a good aroma and smooth texture.

Although named Chocolicious, the division also produces chips, which in actual, also generates a big chunk of the sales of the division. There are three varieties of chips that Chocolicious produce, they are: banana, taro & camote. These chips also come in different flavors like barbeque, sweet and sour, cheese and so on. These chips are batch produced so basically there is a high amount of standardization involved in producing these chips. The taro & camote are chipped using a machine while the banana is chipped using manual labor. The taro, camote and banana are chipped thick enough to produce a crispy but tasty chip. The chipped taro, camote and banana are then fried according to the recipe that the Chocolicious had established. The finished products have different qualities, for example, the banana chips must be crisp and must be fried until its color turns gold. While the camote and taro must be crisp and must not look over fried. These chips are then packed manually. Each type of chip has its own type of plastic container and each type of plastic container has different sizes.

The label that is used by the Chocolicious division is printed out by third parties outside the company. The design of the labels are made by a professional editor which is then printed in a sticker to be placed in the containers. The labels includes date of manufacturing, expiration

date, several agencies which helped the Chocolicious division, general ingredients, flavors and the name of the product.

Part III

The group deliberated the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that are present in each specific areas of operations. Through thorough analysis and debate the group concluded that the areas of Layout Design, Strategic Capacity, and Supply Chain Management are the areas which needed significant improvements.

Layout Design:

According to the group, the layout of the workplace for manufacturing chocolates is cramped. The space is very small in relevance to the number of people working in it. The group is concerned that the small workplace might cause injuries to the workers and damages to the products that they produce. Also, the space of the workplace is not efficiently utilized since there are unnecessary things that are placed there. If this unnecessary things are removed then workspace would be much wider and more work friendly. Moreover, the drainage system of the workplace for manufacturing chips is not properly made. The canal is not covered, which might cause someone slipping into it. This may also affect the cleanliness of the area which the chips are manufactured.

Strategic Capacity:

Based on the opinions and observations of the group, there are parts in the operations of the Chocolicious that have bottlenecks. These bottlenecks causes overtime which results to higher labor cost. The group pointed out that having this bottlenecks causes slack in production. Even though the division is able to meet its demand, the way they achieve it is costly and tiring, in the part of the workers. For example, in manufacturing chips there is only one stove available. So basically there is a bottleneck here when the chipped banana, taro and camote are set to be fried because of the lack of equipment. Due to this the volume of chips that can be fried is only limited to the capacity of the only stove. Thus it would take longer time for the workers to meet the specific demand or order, resulting to overtime and exhausted workers. By fixing this bottleneck the division would not just save on labor cost but also will be able to increase its capacity and efficiency.

Supply Chain Management:

The concern of the group in this area is about the availability of the suppliers, consistency of the quality of the raw materials, and transportation cost incurred by the division in acquiring the raw materials. Based on the opinion of the group, having a permanent supplier

must be a priority for Chocolicious because if there will be no permanent supplier then there might come a time that no raw materials will be available for production especially since the division is applying the Just in time inventory management system. Even though there are suppliers which had supplied the division of raw materials for a long time already, having no contractual agreement between suppliers might still cause losses due to sudden backing out of a specific supplier. Also, since there are no contractual suppliers, consistency of quality might become an issue sooner or later. Since there is no contractual suppliers, the division would have a hard time going against their current suppliers in cases when the raw materials acquired are not of good quality. Finally, if there will be contractual agreements with suppliers, the division might be able to have schemes for lessening the transportation cost.

The group had come up with these areas by considering different factors such as the current demand, manpower available and the current status of the division in terms of budget. The group then agreed that if ever that this areas are improved then the division would be able to improve its whole operations, would be able to meet higher amount of demand and would be able to compete in a higher level of market.