Cybelle Trad Date: October 22, 2020

Fouad Abou Haidar

Management Principles

MGT 201

Case Study 2

Quest 1:

First off, the timbuk2 is already using the scientific management approach by:

 employees are involved in the management (relying heavily on employee suggestions and
ideas)
 minimum wages/hour (a dozen of Chinese women immigrants works at timbuk2 , they
are known to have lower wages and lowering labor costs from 16% to 12%)
 Encouraging workers to learn new skills (SVCV would pay 11$ an hour plus paying
employees when obtaining new skills
 Highlight on customer (three panel construction design that enables customers to custom
choose from 13 colors)
 Time saving in production (the time of manufacturing was reduced to 12 minutes)
But it depends from which way we need the scientific management approach, the scientific
management is bounded only to the production process in this case, however if we are talking
about the whole management process then the scientific approach is currently insufficient to this
company.

Quest 2:

Organizational Behavior (OB) is the study of the actions of people at work; people are the most
important asset of an organization, it helped rob to confirm that all of his workers are connected
with each other, timbuk2 knows how to keep their employees happy and productive, and by that
the work that seems to be done is on a professional scale. We can also say that timbuk2 pays
attention to the ideas of the employees; timbuk2 helps them to learn and prosper. This method
that timbuk2 is using is making their employees more productive, it also increases creativity and
innovation which can be key assets is knowledge management.
Quest 3:

 Open systems: Dynamically interact to their environments by taking in inputs and

transforming them into outputs that are distributed into their environments, in the open
system approach the system is interacting with the environment
 In the input: the company looks into the employee’s suggestions and ideas for new
product customization, the raw material is purchased weekly just to save money from
inventory costs, the customers can get involved in the process by choosing different
design and this will also help in lowering costs
 In the transformation: workers are given responsibilities the same as managers, they
monitor each product till the end stage, and every bag that is processed by the worker is
getting his or her material upon a design request from the customer
 In the output: when the bag processing is finalized, a group of designed bags destined for
a particular area are shipped together in order to reduce cost

Quest 4:

 A large business model

 Employees are well satisfied
 Employees are encouraged to obtain new skills
 Relying on ethics
 Customers are satisfied
 Sustained improvements in effectiveness
 Management improvement