Analysing the Snappy Snaps store in Baker Street via Linear Programming method, we found out the production costs could be optimised by making number of staff redundant. The result from

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Introduction

Technology is evolving ever more in our lives and playing a greater role everyday as speed and convenience are becoming more crucial for a success. Such technology trend has affected the world of photography and our day to day habits as people are becoming more digital dependant than analogue.

Digital photography came into existence years ago but it is since 2000 that this industry has been experiencing a velocity of innovations and booming.

Snappy Snaps is a franchise chain worldwide which operates in the UK through its 162 store layouts. The chain is well known for its quality as well as speed of servicing as most of operations would finish in less than an hour. The main area of focus for the business is the digital photo printing that is ever getting more popular within the nation. But the operation does not limit to photo printing; here is the list of services provided by snappy snaps:

  • Real photos from digital & film in one hour
  • Photos onto CD in one hour
  • Print from Print/Slide
  • Reprints and enlargements
  • Passport photos
  • Black and White developing and printing
  • Slide processing
  • 120 Developing and printing
  • Contact prints
  • Scanning of images onto CD
  • Photo promotional items/gifts
  • Photo manipulation
  • Poster restoration  
  • Photos onto canvas
  • Design services
  • Films, Batteries
  • Frames & Albums

Wide range of above services also could be personalised and customised for special occasions and gifts; such customisations include:

  • T-shirts
  • Mugs
  • Coasters
  • Greeting cards
  • Mouse-mats
  • Jigsaw puzzles
  • Candles
  • Pillowcases
  • Aprons
  • Teddy bears

The Snappy Snaps store in Baker Street provides most of above services and benefits from a highly business-oriented location which is understandably busier than the more rural areas. The store is managed by Miss Tatam Roffmann and there are five further employees. Two employees are on a full-time basis and the remaining three employees work part-time. Those full-time members also operate the machines as well as serving customers. Despite the desire of the store manager, not all the employees could operate within all machines and areas within the store. The store policy is to have three employees (including the manager) at any given time to be able to serve customers although the customer demand is relatively low within certain hours and days.

The store size is roughly about 250 ft² including the back stage and due to physical limitations and size and number of machines, there is not much to optimise in terms of layout and service area.

There are three main machines in the store for developing, printing and poster printing that could be supervised by only tow of the employees. The rest of machines and cameras are pretty much self operated and would not need particular expertise to be run.

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There are number of suppliers within the store’s service management chain however Kodak is the sole supplier of printing papers as the machines are all Kodak, the other main supplier is Champions which provides most of chemical ingredients and so on. The supply chain is pretty much a simple one as most of orders would deliver directly by currier the morning after order requests. And the pattern of such ordering is mostly fixed as the orders take place once a month and due to physical storage limitation it can not be changed.    

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