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.