Operations and Materials Management - Essay Example

Companies keep on upgrading themselves to gain competitive edge and keep up with changing demands and preferences of consumers. This paper is to observe and analyze the operations and materials management of three firms- McDonalds, world wide chain of fast food restaurant; Panda Express, a fast food Asian cuisine restaurant; Wendy’s, quick service hamburger company.   All the three companies have a well set operations management that focuses on acquiring the raw material cost effectively; process the raw material to make it ready to bring it out to the shelf for the final use by consumer.

This is typical of the Wendy’s operations and its business strategy (Stevenson, 1996). The common thing about the three large firms is that all three have well planned and strategically designed Standard Operating Procedures in addition to their indigenous solution in relation to the nature of industry they are thriving in. In order to avoid huge amount of capital investment in acquiring and building the infrastructure, McDonalds and Panda Express sells franchisee to local investors. McDonalds is a fast food restaurant catering to all classes of consumers across its chain of set ups globally; it relies on providing fresh food to its consumers in the quickest time possible.

The key to its success globally irrespective of the geographical or cultural barriers has been its use of Just In Time (JIT) inventory management system. This system keeps a complete track of the available stock against the current and future demand of the raw material. It helps avoiding overstocking and under stocking at any given time; thus, ensuring healthy and fresh food for consumers (MacDonald, 2000, p. 263). The McDonalds’ management strategically makes a decision on keeping the labor cost low by scheduling the roster as per the store rush depending on peak and non-peak hours.

Scheduling of staff roster is one strategy that has been found to be common to all the three companies being analyzed. In all the cases, there is a team of trained staff, where each member is not only specialized to perform a specific task, but also trained to handle more tasks at the same time in case they are required to do so. The companies encourage multi-tasking at their establishments. It helps in scheduling the roster on the basis of peak and non-peak hours; as the staff strength is generally kept low during the non-peak hours, which requires every team member to handle more than just their specific task.

On the other hand, during the non-peak hours the work force at all the three firms is so stationed that one individual handles one desk that he specializes in. The well planned and consistent operation process across their chain of establishments and trained staff ensures low cost and improve the overall efficiency. The operating systems adopted by the three firms are primarily the same irrespective of the level an employee holds in the organization. Costs associated with operations maintenance and monitoring in a company can generally be put under five different headers, which are plant, inventory, labor, raw materials, and distribution.

All the costs associated with a company can broadly be classified into two categories, fixed costs and variable costs. As the terms imply, fixed costs are the ones that are incurred irrespective of the running status of a firm and variable costs are ones that are incurred at various stages of operations, like equipment maintenances, labor costs, plant