Operations Data (AQA A Level Business): Exam Questions

Source B: Warburtons

Warburtons is the largest family-owned bakery business in the United Kingdom and in 2025 it entered its 150th year. It is still owned by the Warburton family, bakes in 13 bakeries and employs just over 5 000 people.

The year to 27 September 2025 was a record one. Revenue grew 3.9% to £769.9 million and the volume of products sold grew 4.2%. Operating profit rose 30%, from £33.3 million to £43.2 million, and profit before tax rose 33% to £42 million. During the year the company recruited more than 400 new employees, although after leavers the workforce grew by only 45. It also bought a former Rathbones bakery, which it expects to have running by September 2026.

Even after that jump in profit, Warburtons keeps only a few pence of every pound it takes. Bread is sold mainly through a handful of large supermarkets, which negotiate hard on price, so the company cannot pass higher costs on. Almost all of its improvement has to come from making bread more cheaply and wasting less of it.

That is difficult, because a standard loaf has a shelf life of five days and the business is judged on getting it onto the shelf fast. Bread that is rejected at the bakery, or returned unsold by a retailer, cannot be sold at all. Over the last four years both of those figures have been rising, and its bakeries differ widely in how much bread each employee produces.

Source: Warburtons annual results for the year to 27 September 2025

Appendix E: Selected data for Warburtons, year to 27 September 2025

Source: Warburtons

Appendix F: Output and employees at four Warburtons bakeries

All four bakeries use the same equipment and make the same products.

Source: Analyst

Assess the usefulness of the data in Appendix F to Warburtons in deciding how to improve its operations.

Calculate the number of loaves each employee makes at the Burnley bakery to support your answer.

Source B: Aldermoor Precision Ltd

Aldermoor Precision Ltd machines metal components to order for aerospace and medical equipment makers. It has one workshop in Hampshire, 42 employees and a small number of large customers, each of whom sends drawings and expects parts made to within a few hundredths of a millimetre.

In the year to March 2025 it made 92 400 components, had revenue of £3 696 000 and an operating profit of £369 600. The operating margin was 10%, down from 14% three years earlier.

Nothing has gone obviously wrong. What has happened is that more components are being made twice. A part that is out of tolerance can sometimes be reworked, which uses machine time that was meant for the next job, and sometimes has to be scrapped, which loses the material as well. Both have been rising for two years, and because almost every job is made to a customer's drawing rather than held as inventory, a scrapped part usually means a late delivery too.

The managing director, Ruth Castellan, has two proposals on her desk. One is to buy a second computer-controlled machining centre, which would let the workshop take on more work. The other is to stop organising the workshop by type of machine — all the lathes together, all the mills together — and instead group machines into cells, each cell making a family of similar parts from start to finish, with the operators trained to run every machine in their cell.

The first costs nearly four times as much as the second. The second means the workshop does more with fewer people.

Source: Aldermoor Precision Ltd

Appendix E: Aldermoor Precision Ltd selected data, year to March 2025

Source: Aldermoor Precision Ltd

Appendix F: Components reworked and scrapped at Aldermoor Precision Ltd

Source: Aldermoor Precision Ltd

Assess the impact of rework and scrap on Aldermoor Precision Ltd's profit.

Calculate Aldermoor Precision Ltd's unit cost to support your answer.

Source B: Nissan Sunderland

Nissan's plant in Sunderland is the largest car factory in the United Kingdom. It opened in 1986, has built more than 11 million vehicles, and for years has turned out roughly one car every two minutes. It employs about 6 000 people directly, and tens of thousands more work for the suppliers around it.

In 2025 the plant built 273 174 vehicles: 172 641 of the Qashqai family and 100 446 Jukes, plus a small number of others. It also makes the latest electric Leaf, and from 2027 it will add a battery-electric Juke, followed by a battery-electric Qashqai.

The difficulty is not whether Sunderland can build cars well. It is how many it is building. The plant was designed to make around 600 000 vehicles a year, so it is running at well under half of what it could do. Every year the factory carries the cost of a building, the machinery inside it and the people who keep it running, whether it makes 273 000 cars or 600 000.

In May 2026 Nissan announced it would bring production together onto a single line rather than running two, which would mean a smaller factory making much better use of itself. The alternative was to keep both lines and try to win enough new models to fill them.

Source: Nissan Sunderland Plant and Nissan Europe announcements, 2025 to 2026

Appendix E: Selected data for Nissan Sunderland

Source: Nissan

Appendix G: Cost and quality at Sunderland

Source: Analyst

Assess the usefulness of the data in Appendices E and G to Nissan in judging how well the Sunderland plant is performing.

Calculate the number of vehicles built for each employee in 2025 to support your answer.

Source B: Toyota Manufacturing UK

Toyota Manufacturing UK builds the Corolla Hatchback and Corolla Touring Sports at Burnaston in Derbyshire, and the engines that go into them at Deeside in north Wales. Together the two plants employ about 3 000 people. Burnaston began building cars in December 1992 and built its five millionth British car, a Corolla, in October 2024.

A finished car leaves the Burnaston line roughly every 90 seconds, and about 150 000 cars a year are built there. Around 85% are exported, most of them to Europe, so the plant is judged against Toyota's other factories and has to win its work rather than be handed it.

Burnaston is run on the Toyota Production System. Anyone on the line may stop it by pulling a cord if something is not right, and it does not restart until the problem is understood. Teams meet in short standing huddles at the start of each shift, and improvements suggested by the people doing the job are expected rather than hoped for.

That makes the plant unusual in how much it measures. It records the time taken at every station, the number of cars that come off the line needing no further work, the defects found for each vehicle and the cost of putting them right. None of these figures are kept quiet: they are written up on boards the whole shift can see.

The pressure now is cost. European plants with newer lines and lower wages build the same model, and Burnaston has been asked to find a further saving on every car without spending heavily on new equipment.

Source: Toyota Manufacturing UK and Toyota Motor Europe

Appendix F: What Burnaston measures

Source: Analyst

Appendix G: Quality at Burnaston

Source: Analyst

Assess how useful the figures Burnaston collects are in judging how well the plant is performing.

Source B: Hallerton Cold Stores Ltd

Hallerton Cold Stores Ltd keeps frozen food for other people. It runs one store near Hull with 18 000 pallet spaces, holds it at about minus 24 degrees Celsius every hour of every day, and moves 1 900 pallets in and out daily. It employs 110 people, had revenue of £14.2 million in the year to March 2025 against operating costs of £12.4 million, and made an operating profit of £1.8 million.

What makes the business unlike a warehouse is electricity. Keeping 18 000 pallet spaces that cold cost £4 464 000 last year, which is by a wide margin the largest thing the company spends money on, more than it spends on wages. The bill also moves with the weather: a pallet space uses about 83 kilowatt hours in July and 58 in January.

The store is nearly full. It runs at 92% of its pallet spaces on average, picks 97.8% of pallets inside the hour it promises, and has been outside its agreed temperature range three times in a year. The oldest refrigeration plant is nineteen years old.

Customers want more space than Hallerton has, so a second store is agreed in principle. Two things are not. One is where to put it: beside the existing store, where the grid connection exists and the night shift could be shared, or in the East Midlands, far closer to the three customers who provide over half the revenue. The other is what to build: the same again, or something that uses a third less electricity for every pallet space and costs several million pounds more.

Source: Hallerton Cold Stores Ltd

Appendix F: What the store is judged on

Energy used for each pallet space, kilowatt hours

Source: Analyst

Appendix G: A second store, and where it could go

Source: Analyst

Assess how useful the data Hallerton Cold Stores Ltd collects about its store is in deciding how to run it.

Source B: Nissan Sunderland

Nissan's plant in Sunderland is the largest car factory in the United Kingdom. It opened in 1986, has built more than 11 million vehicles, and for years has turned out roughly one car every two minutes. It employs about 6 000 people directly, and tens of thousands more work for the suppliers around it.

In 2025 the plant built 273 174 vehicles: 172 641 of the Qashqai family and 100 446 Jukes, plus a small number of others. It also makes the latest electric Leaf, and from 2027 it will add a battery-electric Juke, followed by a battery-electric Qashqai.

The difficulty is not whether Sunderland can build cars well. It is how many it is building. The plant was designed to make around 600 000 vehicles a year, so it is running at well under half of what it could do. Every year the factory carries the cost of a building, the machinery inside it and the people who keep it running, whether it makes 273 000 cars or 600 000.

In May 2026 Nissan announced it would bring production together onto a single line rather than running two, which would mean a smaller factory making much better use of itself. The alternative was to keep both lines and try to win enough new models to fill them.

Source: Nissan Sunderland Plant and Nissan Europe announcements, 2025 to 2026

Appendix F: What Sunderland built against what it could build

Source: Nissan

Appendix G: Cost and quality at Sunderland

Source: Analyst

Appendix H: Two ways of using the Sunderland plant

Source: Analyst

Nissan had two ways of using the Sunderland plant:

Option 1: bring production onto one line

Option 2: keep two lines and win more models

In May 2026 it chose Option 1. Evaluate whether this was the right decision for Nissan.

Calculate the capacity utilisation under Option 1 to support your answer.

Source B: 2 Sisters Food Group

2 Sisters Food Group is one of Britain's largest food manufacturers. It supplies roughly a third of the poultry eaten in the country, also makes ready meals and bakery products, employs around 13 500 people across about twenty United Kingdom sites, and is privately owned as part of Boparan Holdings. In the year to 27 July 2024 turnover was £3.05 billion, up 0.5%, with a profit before tax of £35.5 million.

Poultry is one of the most heavily checked things made in Britain. Temperature is recorded continuously, every batch is inspected, and the sites are audited by their own quality teams, by the supermarket customers who buy from them, by the regulator and by independent certification bodies. Over a year that comes to more than a thousand separate audits.

Everything about the operation is measured because almost nothing about it can be put right later. A bird that is wrong cannot be reworked; it is taken out. A line that stops costs a shift's output, and a site stopped for a day costs hundreds of thousands of pounds. Sixty-eight per cent of sales go to four supermarket customers, and each of them can audit a site at five days' notice.

That leaves two numbers in tension. The sites run close to flat out and want to keep running, and the same sites have to be able to prove what happened to every bird. Stopping the line protects the second and costs the first.

The question in front of the operations board is what would improve what the sites can prove, rather than only what they produce.

Source: Boparan Holdings Limited annual results for the year ended 27 July 2024

Appendix E: 2 Sisters Food Group, published figures

Source: Boparan Holdings Limited

Appendix G: Who checks the sites, and what they find

Share passed last year with no finding:

Audits in total: 1 396

Source: Analyst

Appendix H: Two ways of improving what the sites can prove

3 000 000 birds a week. 0.4% are rejected at inspection, and each rejected bird costs £3.10 to handle.

Source: Analyst

2 Sisters Food Group is considering two ways of improving what its sites can prove about quality:

Option 1: cameras and automatic checks on every line

Option 2: double the number of trained quality inspectors

Evaluate both options and recommend which one 2 Sisters Food Group should choose.

Calculate the weekly cost of the birds rejected at inspection to support your answer.

Source B: Marchwood Precision Ltd

Marchwood Precision Ltd machines aluminium parts for aerospace customers from a single factory near Bristol. It delivers about 170 000 parts a year to nine customers, three of whom provide 64% of revenue. Revenue in the year to March 2025 was £19.35 million and operating profit £1.24 million. It employs 118 people and runs fourteen machines on two shifts.

Aerospace work is sold on paperwork as much as on metal. Every part leaves with a certificate saying what it was made from and who machined it, and those records have to be kept for eleven years. A part that is wrong cannot be quietly used up somewhere else; it is scrapped or sent back through the shop to be reworked.

Last year 2.1% of parts were scrapped and 1.6% were reworked, which cost £412 000 and £268 000. A further £94 000 went on warranty claims. Six inspectors check every part, but they check it after machining is finished, so a mistake made in the first minute of a cut is found an hour later when nothing can be done about it.

The machines themselves are not the constraint. They could cut for 46 000 hours a year and actually cut for 34 500. Most of the gap is setting up: 62 setups a week at an average of 95 minutes each, which is about 98 hours a week when nothing is being made.

The board has agreed that quality has to improve before the next contract review, and is choosing between two ways of doing it.

Source: Marchwood Precision Ltd

Appendix E: Marchwood Precision Ltd selected data, year to March 2025

Source: Marchwood Precision Ltd

Appendix G: How the machine shop runs

Machine hours in a year

Source: Analyst

Evaluate two ways in which Marchwood Precision Ltd could use the records it keeps of its machine hours to increase the time its machines spend cutting, and recommend which one it should do first.