Production budget The firm's inventory policy is to have ending inventory equal to 10% of next month's sales. Fill in the missing numbers. February March April Ending inventory 5,000 Beginning inventory Budgeted sales 8,000 16,000 14,000 Budgeted production (If you get stuck on the beginning inventory for February: it is equal to the ending inventory for January, which you can compute with the available data on February sales)
Required:
(a) Fill in the missing numbers in the table above.
(Hint if you get stuck: What is the relation between ending inventory for one month and beginning inventory for the following month?)
(b) Why do firms want to hold inventory of finished goods? (an alternative could be to produce exactly the amount they are going to sell, and hold zero inventories)

Acompany that makes shopping carts for supermarkets and other stores recently purchased some new equipment that reduces the labor content of the jobs needed to produce the shopping carts. prior to buying the new equipment, the company used 6 workers, who produced an average of 79 carts per hour. workers receive $16 per hour, and machine coast was $49 per hour. with the new equipment, it was possible to transfer one of the workers to another department, and equipment cost increased by $11 per hour while output increased by four carts per hour. a) compute the multifactor productivity (mfp) (labor plus equipment) under the prior to buying the new equipment. the mfp (carts/$) = (round to 4 decimal places). b) compute the productivity changes between the prior to and after buying the new equipment. the productivity growth = % (round to 2 decimal places)