Wace Burgess

Introduction
Wace Burgess is a pre-press and printing company, which the largest part of its business is the production of cards, including Christmas cards, every-day cards and special days’ cards. Their customers are mainly creative publishers and supplying retailers. The size of each order from publishers is quite small and with many different designs. With the changing of the card market, cards were being sold through larger retailers, like supermarkets, more than being sold in those smaller sizes of retail outlets. The case begins with Marks & Spencer (M&S), which is a worldwide massive retailer. Mass production have been using in its business, which means the products from M&S would have a high volume but low variety.

M&S requires a mass production of 600,000 cards with a few designs, which the production size is much larger than the usual, that is about 8,000 at a time on average. This meant M&S is on a high volume basis while the existing customers are on a low volume basis, usually done in batches. Also, M&S will not need frequently change over as it requires a mass production of the same type of products. Secondly,

What are the external performance objectives for the M&S business, and how do these differ from those existing customers? There are five main operations performance objectives, including quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost. When M&S makes an order from Wace Burgess, the above external performance objectives for the M&S business are different from those for existing customers in Wace Burgess. Firstly, M&S requires a higher quality of cards than the other buyers. Looking into M&S business, one of the main objectives of M&S is offering high quality services and products to customers. As can see from its order, M&S is requiring a special paper, as well as the size of the sheet and cards, which is difference from the requirements received by Wace Burgess from other customers before. Moreover,

What are the potential risks and rewards of accepting the order from M&S? In the given table 4.1, it is shown that the majority of the orders were relatively small in size between 5000 and 10,000 sheets, in average of about 8,000. This is much smaller than the size of the single order from M&S of 600,000 sheets. This implies that, if Wace Burgess accepts the order from M&S, the demand may exceeds its capacity. If in that case, either Wace Burgess fails to deliver the products to M&S on time or the other customers turn away. In results, profits may decrease significantly or even both the reputation and market position will be lost. However, if the above potential risks can be solved completely, the rewards of accepting the order from M&S will be quite considerably. Besides the profits gained continuously from the business with M&S every several weeks, Wace Burgess may also experience in excellent reputation in the pre-press and print technology market. It may also receive more orders from the larger retailers, which would also increase its profit.