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Introduction

Manufacturing Strategy ASSIGNMENT 1 Content Content.................................................................................................2 Introduction.........................................................................................3 Investment Department........................................................................3 Sales and After Sales Department..........................................................5 Design Department..............................................................................6 Process Planning Department...............................................................7 Production Planning Department............................................................7 Good Inwards and Material Stores Department......................................8 Purchasing Department..................................................................... 10 Quality Assurance Department........................................................... 11 Production Control Department ..........................................................12 Production Department...................................................................... 13 Tool Stores Department..................................................................... 14 Final Quality Assurance Department................................................... 15 Finished Part Stores Department........................................................ 15 Assembly Department....................................................................... 15 Test Department............................................................................... 16 Despatch Department....................................................................... 16 Harpers at a glance.......................................................................... 17 Summary..........................................................................................20 INTRODUCTION: A manufacturing firm's production strategy must be aligned with its broader business strategy. Many firms seek to be low-cost, bulk providers of mass-produced goods. Others choose to produce smaller batches of more specialized products. Still others elect to remain highly flexible in their design and production specifications, quickly reacting to shifts in customer requirements. Identifying which competitive position a firm should occupy is crucial to its market positioning and financial success. JD Engineering a manufacturer of food manufacturing plant acquires Harpers PLC, a manufacturer of paper and cardboard making plants, by reasons of diversification. After a while, Harpers PLC have big problems with the operational business. Almost every single department has his increasing problem. Harpers PLC on the hole has problems to survive. Due to many complaints from customers in terms of product quality and late deliveries, the MD of the company employed an AP management consultant. The consultant issued a report about the company's status. I want to specify the problems, which may cause the survival problems for the company, in the following assignment step by step. I'll also try to give some proposals how to solve those problems as a long term solution. INVESTMENT: The biggest problem in terms of "investment" is that several departments of the company initiated the purchases on their own interest. In many organizations, managers of different functions are measured in terms of their departmental efficiency and not in terms of overall effectiveness (a business perspective). ...read more.

Middle

By introducing Supply Chain Management, suppliers would corporate closer with Harpers, which means : "partners who can deliver the right quantity to the right place at the right time, every time" so that the purchasing issue would be solved and other departments like Raw Material Stores would have also benefits from SCM. However, working towards JIT and SCM will make the entire business more competitive, for its implications spread far beyond purchasing and stock management. QUALITY ASSURANCE (Bought Out Items) The situation in the Quality assurance department is that there are 3 people employed, who are checking paperwork and deliveries whether they are correct or not. The manager of this department likes to have more staff to guarantee zero defects. My opinion is that nowadays there is no need for a "quality assurance" department. Companies have to be successful and efficient. Instead of engagement of new staff, Harpers should save the money for engaging TQM. Totally Quality Management is a systematic approach to quality improvement that marries product and service specifications to customer performance. TQM then aims to produce these specifications with zero defects. This creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement that boosts production, customer satisfaction, and profits. As I already discussed for prior departments, an introduction of JIT would be another benefit for the Quality Assurance Department, because JIT challenges the quality of the goods. Quality is the bedrock of JIT. As a result, companies which are integrated to Supply Chains or JIT Systems are obliged to produce the required quality. Therefore a method like TQM is very useful to fulfil quality obligations already in the production and other processing's and not after the processes. Your quality improvement process must be planned on a truly organisation-wide basis, i.e. it must embrace all locations and departments and must include customers, suppliers and sub-contractors. You cannot start in one department and hope that the programme will spread from there. ...read more.

Conclusion

MRP (Material Requirement Planning): The classic management tool for monitoring your material needs, the Manufacturing Series MRP module lets you view your entire manufacturing process over time, giving you the information you need to create purchase orders or manufacturing orders to meet open and/or released demand. It is a virtually paperless activity when using the spreadsheet-like view to analyze your inventory levels at any point in time. You can view material requirements in the way that best meets your needs-by days, weeks or months. There is no need to dig through piles of papers or separate order files to find out more about the resource requirements. I think the last point justifies an implementation of the MRP. Harpers has many departments, using paperwork and not knowing about the useless storage of some items in their department. It's very useful to optimize the MRP, which is already implemented. It could help to abolish the paperwork in the Production Planning, Good Inwards and Raw Material Stores department and would also involve advantages to the Production and Assembly department. There are some interfaces between the SAP and MRP system. To avoid superfluous investment, things which could be done by the existing MRP shouldn't be added by SAP. SUMMARY: It is not easy to find the appropriate Manufacturing Strategy to ensure the success of a company. There are a lot of opportunities to make decisions about the future of a company. To get the right way, requires a lot of calculations and a good analytic expertise. For my opinion, investing in Systems I have detailed above, like FMS, TQM, CIM, SAP, MRP will make the live easier for Harpers. But due to monetary reasons, the Systems have to be implemented one after another; thereby FMS have to be the first investment followed by TQM, parts of CIM, then optimizing of MRP and if there is further need, you might invest in SAP- modules. Note: I didn't separate Exercise a) and b). I mixed both Exercises and tried to answer to both tasks. 1 ...read more.

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