Eureka Case 30 min

The Critical Path

You are Martín Ferreyra-Lascano, 47, Project Director at Bodega Los Algarrobos, a family winery in the Uco Valley, Mendoza. The new winery has to be finished before the grapes arrive — and right now it will not be.

The situation

Los Algarrobos has decided to build a new gravity-flow winery — a building where fruit moves down through the stages by gravity instead of being pumped, the standard for premium Malbec. The new bodega has to be operational for this autumn's harvest crush. Grapes do not wait: once the fruit is ripe, it must be processed within days, at quality, or the vintage is compromised.

The crush begins in 21 weeks. The construction plan you inherited has ten tasks, and when you add up the schedule it lands at 24 weeks — three weeks past the grapes. The family is anxious and the loudest voices want money poured into the crush pad and the destemmer line, because "that is where the harvest happens." Before you spend a peso accelerating anything, you need to know which tasks actually control the finish date.

Your job in this case: map the project network, find the chain of tasks that sets the schedule, model where to accelerate, and commit to a plan that has the winery ready before the crush.

The decision

How do you get the winery ready for the crush?

  • A · Crash the harvest-critical tasks
  • B · Crash the critical path by three weeks
  • C · Don't crash — crush once more in the old facility

The rest of the case is locked

The data, the calculations, the decision itself and what happens next open with your institution's access code.

Have an access code?

No code yet?

Instructors can request access for a course. Tell us who you are and which course it is for, and we will send your institution a code.

Run it live in class: every student decides and justifies, and the whole class sees how it splits. How Eureka Case works →