Grantham Roses has been in the business of growing rosebush starter plants for 50 years. Its rose

Question:

Grantham Roses has been in the business of growing rosebush starter plants for 50 years. Its rose bushes are started in greenhouses in British Columbia and shipped across North America every spring in time for the new planting season each year. It specializes in Hybrid Tea rose bushes, which are the most common and come in a variety of colours and have a single rose on each stem, and the Floribunda rose bush, which has roses in clusters of three or four per stem. Grantham Roses ships its rosebush starter plants to specialty gardening centres all across North America.

Growing of the starter bushes is timed so that the majority of the bushes are ready for the spring planting season, but also so that there is a supply of fresh starter bushes throughout the summer and into the fall. Ten percent of the plants that are started do not meet quality control and so they are turned into mulch and composted. It is a great source of pride that a Grantham Rose bush has never been returned from a customer for being of poor quality.

Both rosebush varieties are grown in a special pot that can be planted with the rosebush by the final customer, but because of some differences between the two types of rosebushes, there are slight differences in the resources that are needed for their growth. The Floribunda, for example, requires a support structure (a green post) to be included with the starter plant to provide support for the stems that have multiple blooms.

Grantham Roses has been in the business of growing rosebush

Each new rosebush also requires a cutting from an existing bush in order to start the plant. It takes 9 months for the cut stem to germinate and develop into a new plant, so the gardeners are constantly monitoring the young plants to ensure that they develop properly. Grantham Roses has a garden of approximately 100 acres of mature rosebushes which are maintained in order to provide the millions of cuttings needed for the germination of the new plants. The company is famous for its summer garden and tourists travel from around the world to walk the gardens for free and enjoy the acres of blooms.
The only concern of management is that the purchasing department has had a considerable amount of turnover in the past year. One of its employees, Arla, who had been with them the longest (over 30 years), retired from the purchasing manager's position.
Her husband was also a member of the purchasing team and left at the same time as she did, since they decided to move to Arizona for their retirement. They promoted one of the remaining two people in the purchasing department to manager and hired two new employees. One of these new employees only stayed for a couple of months and the other person quit after 6 months in order to go back to school at the local university. Two more people were hired and they have now been with Grantham Roses for 4 and 5 months respectively. But with all this turnover, it is hard to keep consistency with the purchasing of important resources. The company is thankful that it does not need to source the cuttings-the most important element of its product- but it isn't sure that the other elements are being purchased appropriately. Before Arla retired, she prepared a report to show what she typically purchased as follows:

Planned production of the rosebushes is 5,000,000 units of the Hybrid Tea and 3,000,000 units of the Floribunda variety. Everything that was purchased was used, and it turned out that they were able to produce 5,150,000 Hybrid Tea plants and 3,200,000 Floribunda plants, and the purchases for the year are as follows:

The operations manager stated that it turned out that the direct labour needed for each Hybrid Tea was 0.4 hours and 0.5 hours for the Floribunda. They needed to use 47 g of fertilizer for the Hybrid Tea and 86 g for the Floribunda. And they were able to reduce the amount of soil needed for each bush by 0.01 cubic metres.