Alvin, the production manager at the paragon company, wants to select the best supplier of raw materials from among several vendors. he has several choices and has done research into which company provides the best services and products. one company is known to be extremely timely, another is much lower in price but often late in deliveries, and the third is well-known to provide the highest quality products available. once alvin makes the choice and contracts with the vendor, he will still need to

1. what are the unique operational challenges to delivering fresh meals? 2. why is speed of delivery so important for delivered meals? what variety of options contribute to this performance metric? 3. how could operations management concepts be utilized to improve the performance of freshly? 4. what are your typical product delivery times? what would be required to speed these up? 5. what are your delivery batch quantities? how could you reduce batch size and reduce delivery cost simultaneously using operations management concepts?