Operations Management

I believe the metaphor is accurate. I have been working in the IT industry for the last 11 years and I have worked with many managers. I have experienced mostly average managers who treat every resource equally without weighing those individuals’ strengths or weaknesses. And as a result, we see a huge attrition rate and less job satisfaction among employees. When one employee does what he or her loves doing, automatically job satisfaction goes up and the output and effectiveness of those resources increases. Great managers are great mentors too, they recognize talents. Help employees identify strengths or weakness and help them grow. Hence the metaphor that great managers play chess Like in chess great managers recognizes that not every employee has the same strengths or not everyone enjoys doing the same things. And by recognizing individual strength and weaknesses great managers harness the optimum effectiveness from any team. While managers manage, leaders anticipate and lead....

An investment in education pays the best. = Benjamin Franklin Education is the key to a secure future and much more. In today’s knowledge-driven world most of the manual jobs are being replaced by machines making our lives easier and freeing up much of our time, allowing us to pursue what we like. That could be learning and building robots or studying literature. With time this trend will continue. Many more services and manufacturing jobs will be done, and human will invest more time in doing what they like. While there are plenty of research results telling us education provides us a better life, but still, students do not always give enough importance to education as they should. Cost of education is one factor to keep students away from higher education but that is not only education. Completing any program is not a sprint, it is sort of a marathon in my opinion. And not all of us are full-time students, we study while we live our lives, we work and take care of other necessi...

As a founder member, I have a goal for my company. And I do not want the sole purpose of my business to be making profits. I want my business to be socially responsible and environmentally friendly. For being environment-friendly our business would need to spend some money and that will eat from our profit. Being a CEO I am answerable to my investors who own 75% of the company who wants the business to make at least 15% and not less than that.             Since we are planning for the next 5 years, as a CEO I need to set the mission and vision of the business. And, as CEO and founder, I want the business to remain environmentally friendly. There are many stakeholders of our business that would include, the customers, employees, shareholders, and the society at large, the environment too. If today we do not take care of the environment along with other stakeholders, tomorrow there will be no business to run. Since we need to co...

In the BP oil spill mishap, 11 people died and the environment is damaged so badly that even today the wildlife is suffering. I believe it was an accident and BP could not have done much to stop it. But, as a responsible corporation BP should have prepared for such accidents. The oil spill continued for more than 8 days and then CEO of BP Tony Hayward said “ There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back." Which was anything but insensitive in those circumstances? The accident killed 11 people and killed birds, sea animals and corals (Kamran, 2012). The CEO should have been more careful and empathetic. BP did not have an oil spill plan for the low probability and high consequence event according to Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas. As a socially responsible company, BP should have had a backup plan to deal with such incidents which they did not have. Secondly, the then CEO should have been ...

After losing the spacecraft NASA had done their first level of root cause analysis. As we can see they have identified multiple reasons behind the mishap (Isbell, Savage, 1999). Here are the identified reasons – o   Computer models were wrong for small thruster firings in the spacecraft o   Operational navigation team were not informed of the details of the spacecraft o   Optional engine firing was skipped due to interdependent reasons o   Poor systems engineering function to track and double check all interconnected aspects of the mission o   Informal communication between project engineering groups o   No peer review for the work done by small mission navigation team o   Personnel was not trained on the operation of the mission and detailed navigational characteristics or anomaly report filing process. o   Inadequate quality check to verify and vali...

Since I work in IT and in IT services company similar to Accenture, I have a fair amount of idea of such technological transformation. Large companies often implement enterprise-wide software solution integrating communication, IT, Data and physical elements. This kind of integration often remove time lags and brings in more availability. Brynjolfsson and McAfee claim that automation and technology are destroying jobs at a rapid pace (Rotman, 2013). Since we are not completely Artificial Intelligence driven world yet, we need human to operate this software. Actual human intelligence is required to analyze and comprehend any data that we get from these solutions. So, if the organizations had some personnel doing the same job before manually what the software solution is supposed to do now, those jobs will become redundant. As a result, those roles might get obsolete. But the same person can be trained for the new roles which will be required to operate on the new system. Use the softw...

I believe this system is indeed revolutionary. Mostly because I see this whole system to be really efficient. Just in time, mostly cuts out waste of material and parts, saves time and most importantly saves cost. Having consistency makes sure cars or models of cars are mass produced, and as quickly as possible. I think standardized parts and models made the cars easy to maintain afterward too. Most importantly, quality check at every point of manufacturing and through quality check of the finished car makes sure that the customer is getting the best possible quality. TNGA was required to meet changing customer needs. Every year each manufacturer are bringing out better-looking cars with enhanced features and exteriors. So, while Toyota was making sure of standard and quality but the process made it difficult to change the design or introduce change. Now TNGA as a platform allows Toyota to minimize parts while maximizing variations per customer needs, so of course, this is revolutio...

Zara is mainly doing their business in Europe and North America and their business model requires the whole supply chain to be in close proximity. To make sure the whole inventory turn around happens quickly. But, to grow business they will have to step into emerging markets and replicating the same process from designing to getting the fabrics and then getting the whole inventory will need similar set up as they currently have in Spain. I think Zara will need time to integrate and operate in a similar model in new markets. Or they will have to change their current supply chain model. They will have to produce the products locally, as making in Spain or North America will make the products too expensive and unaffordable for consumers in emerging markets. Moreover, any disruption or conflict might disrupt their supply chain, so having a local supply chain will always act as back up if their original supply chain is disrupted. Another problem I foresee is, Zara needs to open t...

As a Procurement Analyst in a large company we will work on a proposal to the chief Procurement Officer identifying the best supplier to outsource, we have 3 choices to pick from. Since the company operates in a mature market, quality and time are critical to the customer. Supplier Price Quality Delivery Others A 90 90 95 Overseas supplier (transport lead time 3 weeks) B 105 100 100 Supplier facing financial issues C 85 85 95 Proximity supplier (transport lead time 3 hours) Let us first consider supplier A, which is an overseas supplier and it will take 3 weeks to transport their product, since time and quality are critical for the mature market the company operates in, so this is a huge red flag. Otherwise, the quoted price, quality, and delivery are all above 90. Supplier B has a different problem. It is going through financi...

Time - Horizon           Coca-Cola Company operates in 200+ countries and has a diverse product portfolio. Although the demand for each product type might vary based on the time of the year for purposes of this project, we are focusing only on the cola product line (“Coca-Cola”). Despite some seasonal variations in demand, for example, increased demand for carbonated beverages due to warmer weather, the nature of the business is very long-term. In addition, the seasonal influences on product demand can be offset by demand fluctuations globally as the northern and southern hemispheres feature alternating climate patterns, winter in South America, Australia and Africa/summer in North America, Europe, and Asia.  For Coca-Cola, long-term operations planning makes sense. Location, the supply of raw materials such as sugar and water, and layout would each benefit from a long-term planning approach. Nature of Demand       ...

Depreciating items such as laptop, desktop or other hardware are difficult to do business with. As we could see in case of HP how they were struggling to make money. Technology advances so fast that, the existing tech items depreciate fast. So, it is ideal for any business to maintain less in inventory but still, they will need to ship fast. With the introduction of Amazon prime, delivery speed has been an essential part of online shopping. We pretty much get everything delivered within 2 days from Amazon. So, I understand why it will be difficult for HP if they want to keep an inventory to ship sooner. But, consumers have a lot of other brands to choose from. While I do not think delivery speed will be a problem from end customers when they shop in brick and mortar stores. Delivery speed is a critical factor only when the purchase is being made online, via a direct channel or via retailers such as Walmart or Amazon. If HP maintains a huge inventory, they may face inventory losses du...