Schedule Marketing Tasks

For additional advice about questions, see the later section of this marketing techniques and tools section titled, Ask-Ask-Ask The Power of Questions.  

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Marketing A Mutually-Beneficial Process Schedule Marketing Tasks... 

Eq.(l 1) is included to rectify capacity availability in the planning model. This correction is done based on the scheduling model task assignment (Wijt,)- Eq.(ll) should he merely apphed to those equipments which are production bottlenecks. Additionally, it is worth to mention that it must be checked that market demand is not actually the bottleneck process in the plarming period, where scheduhng is performed. 

While he was chairman of General Motors Corporation, John Smith was much more concerned with the quantity of cars that would be demanded by the entire national market than with the quantity of cars that an individual would purchase in the next year [5], Part of the marketing task is to attempt to predict what this quantity demanded by the nation will be. The demand side is usually represented by a market demand schedule or table that shows the quantity of goods that will be purchased at a particular price. From the market demand table, a market demand curve is established. This is basically a price in some currency versus the quantity demanded in millions of units per year. (Again, Figure 1.3 is used for demonstration only.)... 

The scheduling of the process requires the scheduler to decide (a) how many times each task needs to be started in order to satisfy the market demand and (b) to assign starting and finishing dates to the tasks. This is nontrivial because a valid schedule must meet the following requirements ... 

We define the following parameters for the example process B0 = Bi = B2 = B3 = B4 = 20 d = d2 = 3 d3 = 2 b = 10 b2 = bz = 4. The initial amount of Si is 20 units and the goal of the production is to produce 8 units of S3 and 12 units of S4. The optimal schedule with respect to the makespan (the overall production time) is shown in Figure 10.2. Each occurrence of a task in the schedule is called an operation and the number of operations must be determined by the scheduler. The schedule in Figure 10.2 is obviously valid because it satisfies the requirements from Section 10.1.3. It is also optimal, because none of the operations can be shifted to the left to reduce the makespan which is determined by the last operation of T3. In the optimal schedule, 2 operations of both, T1 and T2, as well as 3 operations of T3 are necessary to meet the market demand. The optimal makespan is 10 and all raw and intermediate materials have been processed without overproduction of final products. 

Malone, T. W., Fikes, R. E., Grant, K. R., and Howrtfd, M. T. (1988), Enterprise A Market-Like Task Scheduler for Distributed Computing Environments, in The Ecology of Computation, B. A. Huberman, Ed., North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 177-205. 

Another factor that complicates the scheduling and estimation tasks is that requirements for a software system can rarely be specified precisely and completely at the start of a project. The product is often built for an incompletely known environment, possibly for a new market, or to control a novel device. Thus, it is typical for requirements to change throughout the software life cycle. One of the ways to deal with this challenge is to use a flexible process model that requires frequent reviews and incremental delivery cycles for the product. Feedback from the delivered increments can help focus and complete the requirements. 

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