A Case Study of Coordinating An Annual Party Using PERT/CPM

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Nowadays, all firms place a great degree of emphasis on efficiency and pursue the goal of either high profit or low cost. In order to complete a project, a firm has to invest a lot of manpower, resources and time to organize and coordinate a variety of related events. Furthermore, a firm would also request the entire project to be completed within the shortest period of time. The study is aimed at employing the program evaluation and review technique and critical path method to complete the preparation and coordination of the year-end banquet of the case studied. Although the banquet takes only 2 to 4 hours, the case company requests that the preparation be initiated one month prior to the event in order to prevent chaotic situations from occurring on the day of the event. The detailed activities of the year-end banquet are listed in this study and the critical path of the banquet has been found. Moreover, the probabilities of completing the project in different time constraints are calculated. In addition, the Lingo software is used to confirm the time required to finish the project. We also use Lingo to learn how to crash the project if we need to finish the project earlier. The results of this study can be provided to the decision-makers as a reference on how much time to spend on such project.