You are a Chief Operating Officer at the Balto Company Inc. Your company provides class rings to universities throughout the United States. Over the last 3 years your company has experienced a loss in sales due to other companies soliciting your clients with lower bids for class rings. In response to this, your company decided to attain raw materials at a cheaper cost through import rather than domestic resources. As a result you were able to reclaim the largest two clients that were lost to other companies. Each of these clients have graduations coming up in 2024 for which you are to supply class rings to graduates. The first university will have a graduation in May and the second university will expect product for its December graduation. It typically takes 3 months for you to create the finished products, however your company orders all of the raw materials at once in order to get a cheaper price. You have just been informed that your full shipment will not arrive until April due to the import resource having a backlog of orders. This obviously places your product delivery to the first university in jeopardy. Meanwhile the second university has just informed you that the quantity on their initial order is lacking by approximately the amount of product requested by the first university.
As the Chief Operating Officer, you must complete a recommendation report to be submitted to your Board of Directors to remedy this problem and assure that products reach your clients or the report must provide some alternative solution that will allow you to keep the clients if you do not deliver the product on time. You may use a reasonable measure of creative license to orchestrate circumstances in the market to assist in writing the recommendation report