We Stuffies

We Stuffies is a successful manufacturer of stuffed animals in its 15th year of production. It has survived changes to the stuffed animal market by bringing on a large new customer (The Evil Empire) and all the challenges of new work in a very short time. Much of this work for The Evil Empire is standard stuffed animals, but many of the orders are based on local preferences for stuffed animals. For example, a new elk stuffed animal was being developed for the Edmonton Elks football team. Other stuffed animals were developed for other football teams. As the football season progressed, and as We Stuffies started making more customized stuffed animals for The Evil Empire, there were several issues that affected the quality of the stuffed animals produced and caused a great deal of rework for the company.

The Evil Empire was unhappy as their customized products sometimes reached the stores late for use by football fans. In some cases, the stuffed animals were a week or two late which meant home games were being missed. The management of all of the stuffed animals was also challenged by these projects. The Evil Empire expected them delivered on-time and at a low cost, and the We Stuffies was not always doing that. Accounting at We Stuffies was having difficulty tracking the costs for each of the customized stuffed animals, and the shift supervisor were often having problems knowing what tasks needed to be completed and assigning the right employees to each task.

Some of the problems stemmed from the new part time employees. Since many of these workers had flexible schedules, it wasn't always clear which tasks they were supposed to be working on when they came into work. Each stuffed animal being produced was indeed a stuffed animal; but that was all they had in common.

Each stuffed animal had different production steps, different designs, different copywrite issues and different packaging and labels. Some were just duplicates of previous stuffed animals made by We Stuffies but others required extensive design and development. Each stuffed animal production was a complex process, but each animal was going to be made just for a specific The Evil Empire location, as these were all customized for each football team. Each stuffed animal had to be produced on time and had to be made to match just exactly what the team requested. Understanding what each stuffed animal needed had to be clearly documented and understood before starting production.

We Stuffies had been told by the store how many different production jobs the store would need, but they weren't all arriving at once, and orders were quite unpredictable in arriving from The Evil Empire. Some football teams needed rush orders for their games. Some orders arrived as projected, but some came later than anticipated. When We Stuffies finally got all their orders, some of these jobs were much larger than they had thought they would be. Each animal needed to have a separate job order prepared that listed all the steps that needed to be completed, so that tasks could be assigned to each worker.

These job orders were also becoming a problem. Not all the steps needed were getting listed in each order. Often the estimates of time for each task were not complete until after the work was done, causing problems as workers were supposed to move on to new tasks but were still finishing their previous task.

We stuffies projects requires some additional work to be successful.

1. what characteristics make each of the we stuffies

job orders an individual project?