Based on this case, can you help me to answer these questions?

at the case of a piano built by Steinway & Sons, you'll pianists prefer the sound of a Steinway, and the com- see that you're actually looking at a remarkable com- pany's attention to manufacturing detail reflects the fact posite of raw material, craftsmanship, and technology. that when a piano is being played, the entire instrument The process by which this component is made-like vibrates-and thus affects its sound. In other words- most of the processes for making a Steinway grand- is a prime example of a technical, or task, subsystem at and not surprisingly-the better the raw materials, design, and construction, the better the sound. work in a highly specialized factory. That's one of the reasons Steinway craftsmen put so The case starts out as a rim, which is constructed out of much care into the construction of the piano's case: It's separate slats of wood, mostly maple (eastern rock maple, a major factor in the way the body of the instrument to be precise). Once raw boards have been cut and planed, resonates. The maple wood for the case, for example, they're glued along their lengthwise edges to the width of arrives at the factory with water content of 80 percent. 121/2 inches. These composite pieces are then jointed and glued end-to-end to form slats 22 feet long-the measure It's then dried, both in the open air and in kilns, until the water content is reduced to about 10 percent of the piano's perimeter. Next, a total of 18 separate slats-14 layers of maple and 4 layers of other types of -suitable for both strength and pliability. To ensure that strength and pliability remain stable, the slats wood-are glued and stacked together to form a book- must be cut so that they're horizontally grained and one (seemingly) continuous "board" 3/, inches thick. arranged, with the "inside" of one slat-the side that Then comes the process that's a favorite of visitors on grew toward the center of the tree-facing the "outside" the Steinway factory tour-bending this rim into the of the next one in the book. The case is removed shape of a piano. Steinway does it pretty much the same way that it has for more than a century-by hand and all from the press after one day and then stored for ten weeks in a humidity-controlled rim-bending room. at once. Because the special glue is in the process of dry- Afterward, it's ready to be sawed, planed, and sanded ing, a crew of six has just 20 minutes to wrestle the book, to specification-a process called frazing. A black lacquer with block and tackle and wooden levers and mallets, into finish is added, and only then is the case ready to be a rim-bending press-"a giant piano-shaped vise," as Steinway describes it-which will force the wood to "for- installed as a component of a grand piano in progress. The Steinway process also puts a premium on get" its natural inclination to be straight and assume the skilled workers. Steinway has always been an employer familiar contour of a grand piano. Visitors report the sound of splintering wood, but of immigrant labor, beginning with the German crafts- men and laborers hired by founder Henry Steinway in Steinway artisans assure them that the specially cured the 1860s and 1870s. Today, Steinway employees come wood isn't likely to break or the specially mixed glue to from much different places-Haitians and Dominicans lose its grip. It's a good thing, too, both because the in the 1980s, exiles from war-torn Yugoslavia in the wood is expensive and because the precision Steinway 1990s-and it still takes time to train them. It takes process can't afford much wasted effort. The company about a year, for instance, to train a case maker, and needs 12 months, 12,000 parts, 450 craftspeople, and countless hours of skilled labor to produce a grand "when you lose one of them for a long period of time," says Gino Romano, a senior supervisor hired in 1964, piano. Today, the New York factory turns out about "it has a serious effect on our output." Romano recalls 10 pianos in a day or 2,500 a year. (A mass producer one year in mid-June when a case maker was injured in might build 2,000 pianos a week.) The result of this a car accident and was out for several weeks. His painstaking task system, according to one business department fell behind schedule, and it was September journalist with a good ear, is "both impossibly perfect before Romano could find a suitable replacement (an instruments and a scarcity," and that's why Steinways are so expensive-currently, somewhere between experienced case maker in Florida who happened to be a relative of another Steinway worker). $45,000 and $110,000. But Steinway pianos, the company reminds potential The company's employees don't necessarily share buyers, have always been "built to a standard, not to a Spellman's sense of the company's legacy, but many of them are well aware of the brand recognition com- price." "It's a product," says company executive Leo F. manded by the products they craft, according to Spellman, "that in some sense speaks to people and will Romano: have a legacy long after we're gone. What [ Steinway] craftsmen work on today will be here for another 50 "The payback is not in [ the factory]. The payback is or 100 years." Approximately 90 percent of all concert outside, when you get the celebrity treatment forbuilding a Steinway, when you meet somebody for the Steinway process reflect a universal perspective, first time and they ooh and ahh: 'You build Steinways? and in what ways does it reflect a contingency Wow.' You're automatically put on a higher level, and perspective? you go, "I didn't realize I was that notable."" Case ReferencesMANAGEMENT AT WORK Some Keys to Making a Steinway might recognize something like a great big holster. The Everybody knows what a grand piano looks like, case-the curved lateral surface that runs around the although it's hard to describe its contour as anything whole instrument-appears to be a single continuous other than "piano shaped." From a bird's-eye view, you piece of wood, but it isn't really. If you look carefully