Question

TruEarth Healthy Foods, a maker of gourmet pastas, sauces, and meals, wants to build on its successful introduction of fresh whole grain pasta by introducing a similar product concept for pizza. In an increasingly competitive market, TruEarth is extremely unhappy about the results of the focus-group study: consumers are willing to pay for the product significantly less than the company expected. TruEarth is focused on beating its competition and wants to act quickly and decisively, but does not want to compromise the quality of their product.

1. Briefly explain the situation.

2. State the symptoms

3. Identify the probable problem (if many are possible, choose one)

4. Formulate the main question of the study

5. Formulate research objectives

6. What could be the research hypotheses?

Answer 1

1. Briefly explain the situation.

TruEarth Healthy Foods wanted to introduce fresh whole grain pasta for pizza. But, the customer is not willing to pay the expected amount. The company wanted to beat the competition without compromising the quality and at the same time, they wanted to satisfy customer requirement in terms of price.

2. State the symptoms

If the company doesn’t want to compromise the quality of whole-grain past and provide a product at customer demanding price and beating the competitor products, the company would acquire the following symptoms;

• Reduced Profit
• Increased sales
• Better brand image
• Increased operations
• Supplier relationship management more important than customer relationship management

3. Identify the probable problem (if many are possible, choose one)

• Less profit margin, as the quality of the product, is unaltered.
• The high value of return on investment.
• Cost-conscious system: More dynamic system requirement to change the operations when needed to reduce cost.

4. Formulate the main question of the study

How to produce the product at the customer demanding price without compromising the quality?

5. Formulate research objectives

• To study and understand the concept of production system management.
• To enumerate and exemplify the best suppliers’ in-terms of the favourable contract using price, time of delivery and credit value variables.
• To analyses and scrutinize the system to produce the product at the least possible cost.
• To estimate customer satisfaction with respect to the produced product.
• To offer a possible suggestion for betterment.

6. What could be the research hypotheses?

• There is a significant difference in price, delivery time and credit value among considered suppliers.
• There is a significant association between Product quality and production cost.
• There is a significant influence on product quality and product cost on customer satisfaction.