Operations & Systems, Final Paper: he Urban Farmgirls

Collection
Design Strategy (MBA) | Design Division

Course
Fall 2016Operations & SystemsTimothy SmithDSMBA-620-01
Final project
Student(s)
Amodini Chhabra, Changlin Liu, Kaavya Krishnan, Nick Oliviere-Brooks
Description
Final operational initiative report for the San Francisco gardening company, the urban Farmgirls.

Urban FarmGirls is a San Francisco company that specializes in sustainable garden design, maintenance, and gardening products. Presently, UFG’s small staff of five employees is led by CEO and founder Tina Calloway. Our Operations team consists of four students from the Design Strategy MBA program at the California College of Arts; Nick Brooks, Kaavya Krishnan, Changlin Liu, and Amodini Chhabra. We have worked directly with Tina and her staff from August through December of 2016 to identify and address operational initiatives that will benefit the success and longevity of the Urban FarmGirls.

There are four main areas of focus which our team aimed to address. Firstly, restructuring Tina’s time and responsibilities. As it stands, Tina is deeply involved at nearly every stage of her business. She has admitted that she is currently pushed beyond her comfortable limits at UFG, but does not know how to get ahead of things as opposed to constantly putting out small fires. Redistributing her managerial responsibilities and enabling her to re-focus on her strengths and passions will be essential to UFG’s future success. Secondly, our team is dedicated to improving UFG’s efficiency and agility. They are presently running their business almost entirely with analogue tools and methods of record keeping, so we have applied our team’s youth and technical abilities in order to offer a fresh perspective. Next, we have provided strategic recommendations on UFG’s decision to introduce retail sales. If UFG is serious about their plan to implement both online and in-store retail sales by 2017, they will need to have a clear plan of action, while being careful to not spread their current resources too thinly. Lastly, our team has done some digging around through UFG’s financial statements in order to provide them with some practical financial analysis and forecasting. Presently, their record keeping is primarily focused on meeting essential tax preparation needs, so our team has prepared a payback model in order to help inspire and empower UFG to strategically plan for the future.

Project involves a Mutual Confidentiality and Nondisclosure Agreement with a client.

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