A Look at the Toy Company
Abstract
During the fall of 1991, I did my Senior Individualized
Project (SIP) as a work experience SIP with a direct marketing
toy company located in Silver Spring, Maryland. From
September to December I co-managed the warehouse operations
for the company. In this position, I saw a majority of the
operations of the company. I also encountered some areas of
operations which were efficient and others which were
inefficient.
While contemplating my SIP topic, I concluded it would be
best to write a paper I could use as a SIP and also present to
the company president as a tool to run his company. In
discussing this idea with the company president, we decided I
should write on the operations of the company, concentrating
on the areas I saw the most: the warehouse and the software.
As I began my work on this paper, its role expanded one
more dimension when the Haven Corporation requested a copy of
it. The Haven Corporation writes the software which The Toy
Company uses. While discussing some of my ideas with the
programmers of the Haven Corporation, they requested a copy of
my SIP so they could implement some of my ideas into future
versions of their software.
This paper will be composed of three sections. The first
section will be the operations analysis of The Toy Company.
The second section will be a daily log. The third section will
discuss how my SIP related to the courses I have taken at
Kalamazoo College and my future plans.
Throughout this paper, the company for which I worked
will be referred to as The Toy Company. This name is being
used per request of the company president because he does not
want information about his company available to outsiders for
fear of predatory tactics by competitors.