Joint Capacity Planning at Royal Maccabees

Abstract

During the fall quarter of 1990, I was employed part-time at Royal Maccabees Life Insurance Company in Southfield, Michigan. I was supervised by Tom J. Wilkinson, Director of Data Processing Services in the Management Information Services (MIS) division. My job was to enter computer inventory information into a tracking program on an IBM personal computer. For example, I entered the inventory of personal computers and joined to them any monitors, modems, printers and/or token boards that accompanied them so that each item could be tracked to a specific location. In addition to this, I was able to observe and participate in two different projects that Maccabees was looking to develop. These were the acquisition of sophisticated, company-wide telephone message system and the joint capacity planning projects. I was encouraged to sit in on all the meetings that took place for these projects. I observed as many of these meetings as my schedule permitted, and opted to write about the latter.