Operations Management

ADMN 4046 13F

Project Guidelines: Operations Case Study

You are planning to start a manufacturing business to supply steel and aluminum wheel rims to the automotive industry. Your target market is the automotive manufacturers who have assembly facilities in North America..

You require capital to start your business and in order to secure the required capital you must convince a group of potential investors to loan you the necessary funds. Your partners have prepared the Marketing and Financial parts of the business proposal. It is now your objective to prepare a general Operating Business Plan to complete the presentation. You must convince the potential investors that you are capable designing and operating the business successfully.

This course, as an introduction to operations management, touches upon all of the requirements of an operating business plan. The following points are offered for your guidance. You should ensure that you address all of them in your paper.

It should be no longer than 20 pages.

• Mission: Create a Mission Statement, and define what it means to you and what is should mean to your employees, customers and lenders.
• Productivity: How are you going to measure productivity? What process are you going to use to monitor and improve productivity?
• Forecasting: What are you going to forecast? What approaches to forecasting are you going to use? Why? How are you going to monitor forecasts, and control forecast inaccuracies? How are you going to use the information from forecasting?
• Product and Service Design: How are you going to design your products or services? How are you going to ensure the voice of the customer in the process? To what extent do you want to standardize? Why?
• Capacity Planning: How are you going to address capacity decisions? What is your process and what are your expectations from the process? How are you going to deal with fluctuations in demand?
• Process Selection: What type of process are you going to implement? Why? How are you going to ensure employee involvement in the process? Is automation an option?
• Facilities Layout: Is layout important to your business? If so, what layout will you chose and why? If layout decisions are not important, why not? Defend your decisions!
• Work Systems: Define the key jobs in your business. How are your key jobs designed? How are you going to measure jobs and performance? What kind of continuous improvement process are you going to implement in this area?
• Location Planning and Analysis: Where are you locating your business and why? What factors specifically influenced your decision and what are your expectations? What is your future strategy regarding location?
• Quality Assurance: Define your quality assurance program. Describe your inspection process and justify your choices. What statistical tools are you going to use and why?
• Quality Control: Define your continuous improvement program and how you are going to implement it and ensure that it evolves effectively.
• Total Quality Management: Describe your TQM program.
• Supply Chain management: Is supply chain management important in your business? How are you going to structure your purchasing and logistics functions? Will the structure be centralized or decentralized? How will the functions be controlled?
• Inventory Demand: What inventory are you going to carry and how much? Why are you carrying the inventory? What techniques are you going to use to control inventory? How are you going to determine how much to order and when to order? Why?
• Aggregate Planning: What process are you going to use to balance demand and capacity? Why? What strategies are you going to employ when presented with uneven demand? Why? What aggregate planning tools and techniques are you going to use in your business? Why?
• MRP and ERP: What is your MRP program? How are you planning your master scheduling Process? Will you have safety stock? Why? Is lot sizing an issue? If so how are you going to deal with it?
• JIT Systems: Is JIT necessary or important to your business? Why? How will you implement it? How will you monitor JIT performance? What benefits do you expect to gain from JIT system?

Remember when making decisions they must be justified. Always answer the question “why”, when making decisions or choices.

Good luck.

Assume you’ve to do all the Management Operation stuff; don’t worry about technical, Finance and market stuff.