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The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine has adopted many local, regional and international students. For this reason, food must be made readily available and accessible to them. However, there is a problem with the accessibility of such foods. There is only one food court, located on the southern side of the campus. Students on the northern side of the campus attending the university as well as those attending open campus are far away from the cafeteria. This causes extensive time and energy to be lost walking to the cafeteria and these are two resources that are generally very precious s a university student.
List of Alternatives Delivery Services Expanding the existing food court on Southern side of the University Construct small food court Construct large food court Do nothing at all In this project we focused on three of the above alternatives, construct a small food court, construct a large food court and do nothing at all. The reason for the delivery services not being a main alternative is because it can be very costly to call the various restaurants and pay the delivery fee. Secondly, there was the alternative to expand the old food court.
Although ome may see this as cost efficient, it defeats the purpose of having the availability of food to students and staff of the Northern side of campus. Project Objective Due to the problem of the lack of another cafeteria on the northern side of campus a decision must be made as to whether to start a project to create a new cafeteria or not. This is important to increase availability Of food courts around the campus. It can also be seen as an alternative form of income to the university and/or potential businesses, as students as well as people outside the university can easily access the northern side of the campus.
Scope of Analysis To analyze this situation and by extension make a decision as to if an extra cafeteria on the northern side of campus should be constructed was an in depth process. There were three possible alternatives: Construct a large building Construct a small building Do nothing (do not construct new building) To decide which of these alternatives was best, we used decision trees, forecasting and project management as quantitative methods of analysis. Analysis Methods Assumptions We assume that the new food court would attract a positive light to the university.
The construction of the new food court would be convenient to hose students and staff on the Northern side of the campus. We assume that most of the Universitys population would be in favor of the new food court since there are limited food facilities. Limitations As with most things there are Imitations, and this project was no exception. 1 It was time consuming and very demanding to get all the information. 2 To get a proper assessment costs money and was difficult to attain. 3 There was difficulty in determining when the project (building cafeteria) would finish.
For the purpose of this assignment, data was collected through the use of andom sampling. This is defined by Business Dictionary. com as a sampling method in which all members of a group (population or universe) have an equal and independent chance of being selected. Information was gathered through the use of questionnaires and telephone interviews. Information was gathered quite easily from the questionnaires however the telephone interviews proved to be a very tedious and time consuming approach as many departments hesitated to give the information we required.
Nevertheless all attempts were still made, which resulted in a total of six undred (600) potential customers stemming out of the Food and Agriculture faculty (200), Open Campus(150), Main Administration (96), Republic Bank (30), Book shop (10), Campus Estate Police (110) and Quality Assurance (4). Decision Analysis was the first quantitative method tool used to analyse the data collected. Decision theory is an analytic and systematic approach to the study of decision making. To formulate our decision we utilized decision trees and decision making under uncertainty and risk.
This allowed us to get a proper assessment as to whether to construct a small building, a large uilding or do nothing. The second tool used was that of Project Management. We decided on this because Project Management is the most effective tool that can be used to manage these kind of complex projects. From this we were able to find the critical path activities which play a major role in controlling the entire project. The activity on the critical path represents the tasks that will delay the entire project if they are somehow delayed, in other words these are the activities that cannot be delayed.
The third and final quantitative method used to analyse the data was Forecasting. Forecasting seemed like the most appropriate tool to use because it is mostly used to reduce uncertainty and make better estimates of what could potentially take place in the future. The adaptation of forecasting gave us a clear and concise estimate of the new period’s forecast demand. Forecasting demand is therefore important because it helps to determine the potential success of the business. 1 .
Clearly define the problem at hand Consider constructing a new food court on the Northern side of the University of the West Indies. 2. List the possible alternatives Construct a large building Do not construct the new building . Identify possible outcomes, states of nature. In this market it could either be favorable or unfavorable. 4. List the payoffs Identify conditional values for the profits for the large building, small building, and no building for the two possible market conditions (favorable and unfavorable) 5.
Select the decision mode We used decision making under uncertainty and decision making under risk Decision Makin Under Uncertainty 1 . Optimistic (maximax) In using the optimistic criterion, the best (maximum) payoff for each alternative is considered and the alternative with the best maximum of these s selected. To construct a large building, the maximum in row was $304980. To construct a small building the maximum in row was $65488D. To do nothing, the maximum in the row was O.