Operations Management

Introduction Quality management refers to those processes that a business selected to ensure consistency and accuracy. The quality methods approach and techniques that NASA requires to implement to survive the root cause of problems lead to Mars Polar failure are  quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. 1-Quality control — inspection, measurement and intervention Quality control ensures output meets required standards, many businesses carry out inspections of all or part of the total volume of production. When an inspection is conducted, the goods or services under inspection can be passed as ‘okay’ or ‘defective’ (Pack, 2005) . Regarding quality control,  the company did not perform inspections on different stages of the production process. According to NASA  report,  one factor that causes failure is that the  ‘‘systems engineering function within the project that is supposed to track and double-check all...

               Management of projects requires experimentation, flexibility and a willingness to work closely with project beneficiaries to learn about, and respond to local needs. The survival of our project depends on how well do we acknowledge and understand the targeted goals. Organizations are the frameworks through which most projects’ works are carried out and within individual seek to satisfy many of their goals. Against the foregoing, this paper seeks to examine the best approaches, tools, etc. for the factors that mitigate the success of the project.  Factor 1: Errors went undetected within ground-based computer models of how small thruster firings on the spacecraft were predicted and then carried out on the spacecraft during its interplanetary trips to Mars.                A model is an abstraction of reality, a simplified ve...

In this case study, we look at the quality approaches that were undertaken by NASA in 1999 when it lost the Mars Climate Orbiter, a 338 kg robotic space probe (with a cost of $327.6 million dollars) due to a failed translation of British units into metric units in the mission software. This mistake triggered an unintentional de-orbit of the probe and its subsequent disintegration in Mars’ upper atmosphere. This case study analysis will focus on the different types of quality approaches, methods, and tools that would help mitigate the 8 contributing factors that were identified by the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board. This case analysis will focus on each of the 8 contributing factors and provide possible quality approaches, methods, and tools that could help mitigate them. James, T (2011) writes, “Garvin’s (1984) eight dimensions of quality characteristics which a customer looks for in a particular product which namely; performance, features, reliab...

 The Toyota New Global Architecture (TGNA) is in my opinion, not a revolutionary system. While it is admirable for any company to initiate improvements and strive to be an industry leader, TGNA appears to be tweaking or subtle facelift of existing structures and principles. What was truly revolutionary with Toyota was the establishment of the Toyota Production system in 1948, which many companies worldwide adopted under the term “Just in Time Production” (“TNGA explained: engineering for the future”, 2015). Another revolutionary system is ISO 9000, which is an international set of standards for quality management (Knowles, 2011). ISO 9000 has become popular because it is understood and can be implemented globally and research has shown that ISO certification drives business improvement (Knowles, 2011). This scope and depth of global reach and impact are missing from the Toyota initiative. The goals of TNGA are to get back to successful basics, through increased efficiency of th...

Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA) system was created to revolutionize the actual automobile manufacturing systems. TNGA aims to promote a massive transformation in Toyota's development processes by emphasizing in harmony between planning and design, which, when appropriately combined and managed, will increase the company’s efficiency (N.A., 2015). Toyota's TNGA system is revolutionary because it creates an even leaner way of designing and manufacturing its cars and establishes a new era of vehicle design and production. From a different perspective, TNGA is a revolutionary system not because it employs a modular approach; since companies like Nissan and Volkswagen already use modular systems in their production plants (Schmitt, 2015). It is revolutionary because it is disruptive and expands the traditional and legendary Toyota’s lean methodology to a different level (N.A., 2015). This new global architecture system is disruptive to the old Toyota Production System (T...

It might be a little difficult to say because change is a constant factor in life.  I am of the thought that is not revolutionary because as individuals we go through some common changes in our daily activities and that is not uncommon to business empires. Such changes are needed after going through some sort of growth from simple to a more complex stage of running the business.  I see in the case of Toyota with the emergence of TGNA, the company saw the need to remain relevant in business and then came up with a platform/approach to make cars using more unvarying components thereby creating an atmosphere for the engineers to have better Toyota models that would fit into the current trend. (TNGA explained: engineering for the future, 2015). The approach in ramification is not revolutionary since Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines revolutionary as ‘involving a great or complete change’ but a spice up of technology to match up with the global trend of life....

Lean production is a manufacturing philosophy which takes a methodical and systematic approach to provide constantly increasing value to the consumer through immersive employee involvement aimed towards delivering incremental improvement (kaizen) consistently over time (Toyota production system,  n.d ). Lean production is credited to Toyota, a Japanese car manufacturer which developed the system from the management philosophy from famed quality management icon, W. Edwards Deming, and the production techniques of Henry Ford, among others into what is officially called the Toyota Production System (TPS) – later to be known as the generic lean production. The TPS has been adopted across the automobile industry and is what raised Toyota to form a struggling automobile manufacturer in the 1980s to the largest car company at present. The below discussion will discuss the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA) which Toyota touts as a revolutionary improvement on the TPS (Sobek II, Ward...

            According to the official blog of Toyota GB, Toyota aims to revolutionize the development of Toyota vehicles by placing more emphasis on harmonizing planning and design to increase efficiency. Also a greater focus on standardized parts and components cum easier to develop and delivered more quickly and efficiently to customers.             It is clear that to achieve very low defects rates, careful attention should be paid to product design and the specification of key dimensions and other parameters (John Naylor, 2002). Why is it necessary to aim for such low defect rates? The answer to this question lies in the fact that most products have many parameters specified simultaneously. Such components can quickly show defects. We can see this in the area where chief engineers of Toyota try to reduce to the minimum number of different components.   ...