Coast Guard Essay

The United States Coast Guard (USCG) is a military branch serving the both on domestic and foreign shores since 1790. With a motto of “Semper Paratus” or “Always Ready” and a force of around 42,000 the USCG maintains 11 critical missions ranging from port security and drug interdiction to ice breaking operations and enforcing international fishing regulations. One of their more known missions is for Search and Rescue, in fact there are at last five movies based upon the USCG Search and Rescue mission itself. On the less exciting side, the Centralized Service Desk (CSD) is a branch within; it supports the fleets’ daily computer operations. When people think of supply and demand or customer relationships they would rarely associate it with
Our customers use our services to maintain access to the network with exceptional usability. So when a part of our network is interrupted or operating in a degraded state the demand for our services go rise. The supply of our services, however, stays the same causing a shortage and a backlog in labor. Once the interruption is resolved, we resume normal working conditions and the shortage disappears. Our cost for services stayed the same; there was no increase in labor or equipment. When the network has multiple events then the demand for our services rises even more. In this instance the shortage may be above the acceptable degradation limit set by the Department of Homeland Security, therefore they will increase our budget to hire more labor and increase the equipment. Thus raising our cost to our customers and reducing the shortage. Likewise when a new information technology system is introduced and is more reliable than the previous product the fleet will use our services less often, demand will be reduced, and we will have an excess of labor and equipment. Eventually that excess is reduced by a cut in budget and a reduction to staff and equipment. Then the CSD would be back to profit maximization