Manzana

1) The basis for competition in the market that Fruitvale serves is low turnover time between new the issuance of final policies, low turnover times of renewals, low lead times on new policies and quotes, and premium discounts in the event of a delay. These are critical to maintain and increase clients, especially with all the industry competition.

2) The rules used to assign priorities at Fruitvale are significantly hurting the branch. They are losing business because the turnover time is too slow, in turn making agents refer business elsewhere. It is clear that RERUNS don’t take care for themselves, as the number of late renewals has been increasing over the years; missing such deadlines loses old and clients. In addition, RUNs and RAPs are done before RAINs, which shouldn’t be the case because they still make money for Manzana (even though it isn’t as miuch as RUNs and RAPs). In addition, the stack of paper one case encompasses should not be an indicating factor as to what case is done first. FIFO is clearly the most logical system.

3) The important measures of operating performance for the Fruitvale branch is backlog and turnover time, processing time in each department, renewals late, renewal lost rate, late requests processed as compared to total requests processed, processing time to a station, time between arrivals to a station. All these are significant for high performance, yet the Fruitvale branch has not been performing well according to these measures. Their renewal late and loss rate are significantly higher than Golden Gates, and is increasing throughout the years. They have large backlogs and many RERUNS are left uncompleted by the deadline. Turnover time is large, again compared to Golden Gate, and is thus losing business with new clients (from agents) and old clients. However, they have the operating capacity to do a lot better.

4) Profits have been deteriorating because there is a huge backlog of policies, which results in delays and...