Management Concepts - Essay Example

?Introduction Hogsmeadow Garden Center is the prime attraction of a tourist spot “Hogsmeadow” in UK. As the suggests, it has a wide variety of beautifully tended plants, shrubs and trees and several other garden products which add splendor and serenity in the area for the tourists. Apart from these, Hogsmeadow now offers a varied collection of items of customer’s interest thus drawing more of people with every passing year. There are two sales area; indoor and outdoor selling different items as per the suitability. Despite a tremendous growth in number of visitors, the sales and profitability has not seen that significant raise as expected. There are several reasons for such a feeble sales growth, which are discussed in the next paragraph. Major issues faced by Hogsmeadow Glass center Inventory: Hogsmeadow offers a diverse variety of products to its customers both seasonal and year round ones. The owner finds it extremely difficult to precisely estimate the amount of products, specially the perishable and seasonal ones, and thus ultimately ends up suffering loss due to either selling the off season products on huge discounts or throwing off the spoiled products. Estimating the precise amount of the stock is a crucial financing decision as significant costs are associated with the wrong choice. Estimating too low of the product leads to stock out cost, thus waving the customers away. Keeping a stock also results in cost of maintaining the inventory. Thus it is necessary to calculate the amount at which the overall cost of inventory is minimal. There is no appropriate procedure for the calculation of the stock which results in a mere guess as to the amount to be stocked. This dearly cost them. Honeydukes Restaurant: Honeydukes restaurant is the only eatable spot in the surrounding area and thus often experience a gigantic load of customers to enjoy its eatable products and services. Due to the increase in the load, the resulting large queue often enrages the customers and they turn back without enjoying their meals. Three reasons may account for the resulting long queue. 1. The misallocation of work among the available staff: As evident from the case study, from among the 12 staff members, seven are deployed for kitchen work and one each for remaining errands. This allocation of work among the staff members seem inappropriate which results in people standing for long in queue for their turn in peak time. 2. Small area over which the restaurant spreads: Though the area occupied by restaurant has not been stated, yet it is clear from the case study that restaurant does not have enough seating for peak times when people reserve their places by placing their belongings. This shows that some of the visitors may not find a place to sit in and enjoy. One other reason pointed out in the case study for the seating problem is that people, after enjoying their meals or other orders, just sit there for long without any reason thus further causing the acute shortage of chairs. 3. The part of the self-service procedure: The restaurant has a policy of partly self-service and partly assisted service for its customers. The self service results in long queues, having people to wait for long thus resulting in frustration among them. Division of service between self and assisted may be a suitable option for restaurants having organized systems with efficient and multi tasking personnel and a sufficiently larger area to accommodate for such a system. Though self service essentially reduces cost of staff scheduling but for this to work out, staff should be properly trained to work at their maximum speed so that the customers are catered to instantly. In case of Honeydukes staff members, it seems that the kitchen personnel are not trained to deal with many orders simultaneously as evident from the case study. It takes more then the usual time in peak hours to prepare children lunch boxes. Staffing issues: Hogsmeadow Garden Center also has staffing issues. As stated by Don Dursley, finding the right person for the right job at times becomes a complex task to deal with. Though they have responded to their staffing needs by hiring permanent, part time employees and casual employees, who work according to the work load in the center, but still the manager believes that there is a lot of room for improvement to respond effectively to fluctuation in business. The allocation of staff members for the varied task can be improved. The suggestion for improvement shall be given in the recommendation section. Analysis Proper functioning of a system requires managing its several activities. Management is an essential part of every activity so that results can be achieved most efficiently and effectively. From among the various advantages of management, most important of them are: Assists in achieving the set goals by the appropriate arrangement of factors of production, allocation of resources and ongoing control and check thus ensuring the fulfillment of task and final success. Performing activities by applying the rules of management help in using the scarce resources most optimally so that best is achieved out of the minimal resources. Proper planning, an important element of management eventually helps in cost reduction and attainment of results most efficiently and effectively. Every business essentially needs some sort of pre and post planning which gives a clear direction, an organized way of performing several of its activities and control to ensure its constant growth an prosperity (Karagara, 2009) One important discipline of management is “Operations management”; ways employed by the organization to produce its goods and services. As the name suggests, operations management deals with the management of its varied processes which results in the end product or service. It is vital for the success of any organization as the business’s key resources are invested in the operation of activities to produce products or services. Besides the above stated advantages of operations management, it can essentially help in gaining a sustained strategic advantage over its competitors (Hayes & Weelright, 1984; Hill, 1985, 1989; Skinner, 1985). Major functions of Operations management are: Selecting: determining which products and services shall be produced and offered to the customers Designing: ascertaining/ creating the varied means of production Operating: the transformation process which results in the desired product Controlling: keeping a track of performance to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in production and delivery timely and with quality. Updating: involves adapting to the changing environment on the basis of stimuli from both within and out side the organization. Keeping the control on quality issues is of significant importance because quality is one of the factors that decide the success or failure of any business. Such issues as consistency, reliablility and conformance to the customer’s expectations is the major factors assessing the quality of the products and services (Heaphy, 1996). There exists a rich literature supporting the fact that business drivers such as “leadership, customer orientation and more operational issues such as benchmarking, quality control and service designs” are directly proportional to the business performance (Voss & Johnston, 1995; Roth, 1997; Heskett, 1997). Taking the case of Hogsmeadow, it offers a varied range of products and services for its customers. Thus to realize its mission of becoming the world class providers of gardening other related products and services, there is a dire need of applying the principles of operations management. One essential component of operations management is the transformational model; a model which determines the way in which an input is transformed into output. Figure 1 shows the model as below: Figure 1 Inputs Inputs are either used in the process to be converted into the end products; materials, information and customers; or they take part in the transforming process such as staff and facilities. In case of Hogsmeadow Glass center the inputs used up in the transformation process are the information provided by the customer service personnel, gardening information, food raw materials etc. The inputs involved in transforming the other inputs are the staff members deployed for various tasks such as cashiers, information providers, restaurant staff members etc. Outputs can be in the form of products or services. These are the either the intermediary products to be used further in some other transformation process or the end products to be used by the customers. Inputs are transformed into outputs through one of the various types of transformation processes; manufacturing, transport, supply and services. During the process value is added in the input to produce the desired output. Management at each step is essential for the successful achievement of the desired product. Thus its is essential to appropriately plan for the input and transformation process to be utilized, allocate resources most effectively and control the process so that the process remains on the right track. One essential component of transformation model is feedback. Feedback at each stage is a prerequisite of goals achievement. Without feedback one would not know his current performance and may lead to errors of For the desired quality of end products, it is necessary that the inputs should be of superior quality. No matter how much effort one puts in the transformation process to get the desired result, unless the input used is not of the standard value, the output obtained would be unsatisfactory. Though Hogsmeadow has witnessed a surge in its visitors but a feeble profitability and sales growth rate could be attributed to its inferior quality of inputs predominantly the inefficiency of its staff members. Hogsmeadow Glass center needs staff with varied skills so that they can handle multiple tasks simultaneously. It seems from the case study that there are no means of getting feedback specially from the customers. Thus feedback cards should be used to pool in the comments of the customers over the range of the products and services. This would help the center personnel in assessing their performance and improving where necessary. Application of 4 Vs of Operation Management: Four major factors influencing the major decisions related to operations management are: Volume: the volume of products and services as offered by HGC is not stable depending upon the demand Variety: HGC offers a wide variety of products and services thus drawing more of the visitors towards it Variation: variation in demand due to unexpected customer flow often leads to stock out cost or wastage of spoiled products. Visibility: HGC has succeeded in becoming visible among its competitors by offering exclusive products to its customers. These Four Vs are important principles in the field of operation management that needs to be worked out appropriately in order to achieve the set goals most effectively and efficiently. Recommendations Inventory management is essential part of a management process. As evident from the case study, manager of Hogsmeadow delineated the associated inventory problems. One effective way of tackling with the inventory issue is to employ the technique of Just-in-Time inventory for perishable and seasonal goods so that the associated inventory cost is reduced and the chances of wastage are minimal. For JIT to be effective, demand should be stable (Ohno, 1988). This can be assured by doing a thorough research on the number of visitors and the type of products bought at different times of the year. On the basis of collected data, demand can be calculated and the products ordered accordingly. For the year round products an effective accounting technique should be used to determine the quantity of inventory to be maintained at which the total inventory management cost is minimal. Honeydukes restaurant should include more of the area in its premises so that it can accommodate more people during peak hours of the year. A take away counter should be set up for those who want to enjoy the food outside the restaurant which shall significantly reduce the seating load inside the restaurants. Simply relying on the fully assisted service will wave off the issue of long queues which can be really time consuming causing frustration at times. For this more of the waiters could be hired who work efficiently in taking up orders and presenting the prepared meals. To deal with the issue of late sitters, restaurant can offer its complimentary item outside the restaurant which needs to be availed right after the meal or coffee thus motivating people to get up early than the usual time they take. Staffing is a serious issue as it influences the quality of service. The manager should focus on hiring multi dimensional workforce; people who have multiple skills and can perform various tasks if necessary. In case, such workforce is not available, they can trained through various techniques including on and off the job training, rotations etc which will eventually help in instilling skills in them. Thus people with varied skills could be deployed to different jobs depending on the requirement. This would essentially weed out the need for more workers ultimately reducing the cost. Read More