Read the following Case study and answer the questions that follow. Sona Enterprises In its 50+ year history, Sona has excelled in manufacturing specialized construction equipment. Recently, management has noticed that manufacturing productivity and quality has been falling behind the competitors. In response, several projects were launched, one of which was to focus on reengineering the factory layout. Management tasked a two - tier team to get the job done. The first tier was the core project team, a cross - functional group of middle managers responsible for managing the project effort. The second tier, the extended team of manufacturing specialists, oversaw doing the project work. Faced with the lack of a formal project management process and experience, the core team received basic project management training before hiring a consultant who helped develop a detailed CPM schedule. Gearing to launch the execution, the core team explained the CPM schedule to the extended team members, asking them to get the work started and to report progress in a week. The problem was, the extended team members commented, that because of CPM s complexity, they were not able to use it as a basis for planning, organizing, and reporting. A few days later, a quality improvement project (QIP) including members from both teams was chartered to find a solution to the problem. WHAT IS CPM? Developed by the DuPont Corporation in the 1950s, Critical Path Method (CPM) is a network diagram technique for analyzing, planning, and scheduling projects. It provides a means of representing project activities as nodes or arrows, determining which of them are critical in their impact on project completion time and scheduling them in order to meet a target date at a minimum cost. CPM uses deterministic activity time estimates (the most likely), rather than probabilistic activity time estimates (e.g., the optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely) such as those used in Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). The typical use of CPM was for construction projects, although it is nowadays applied in many types of projects across various industries

QUESTION 1 (5 Marks) 1.1.In response, several projects were launched, one of which was to focus on reengineering the factory layout. Describe the problems that Sona was experiencing and how it affected the company.