Industrial Management: Situational Review and Key Areas of Difficulty - Essay Example

Industrial Management: Situational Review and Key Areas of Difficulty A medium sized engineering company that employs 3000 people in Manchester has an opening for a deputy manager for a plant in Plymouth. After nomination to this position, the next deputy manager is shocked since the word doing the rounds is that the plant at Plymouth is being shut in six months because of its poor performance and the losses it is making. However, it is soon made clear to the deputy manager that this is not true and that his work is to help the site manager at Plymouth rescue the plant’s business. After travelling to Plymouth and assessing the situation, the plant manager is unequivocal pertaining to the problems facing the plant. The first problem facing the plant is that the market for its products, including pumps for fuels, chemicals, oils, and industrial effluents, while stable, faces an uncertain future in growth. This is especially true for more expensive and complex products. However, the company does have product designs that compete favourably with other suppliers and could be developed to cope with any future requirements, although these products only exist in their design stage. Additionally, the company is making losses, especially due to the return of many products for repair or rework because of low quality. Suppliers are also increasingly reluctant to deal with the company and are not delivering their components on time. Additionally, customers are not placing long-term repeat orders because the quality problems are frustrating for them. The plant also has old manufacturing equipment and test machines that break down on a regular basis, with spare parts hard to come across. Finally, despite the enthusiastic and loyal nature of the employees, morale is low ever since rumours of the plant’s closure started flying around. The nominal deputy manager is also viewed as the prophet of doom, coming to run the plant down to closure. Short and Long Term Proposals A notable problem facing the plant is a lack of repeat orders from customers because of their misgivings regarding the product’s quality and lack of trust from the suppliers. The six-sigma approach can be used to solve this problem, especially the SIPOC tool. This tool acts as a high-level visualization of the process that serves the customer. It stands for Suppliers-Inputs-Process-Outputs-Customers (Allen, 2010: p21). The suppliers provide the process with inputs, which define material used by the process for the production of outputs; the process can be comprehended as a series of activities that add value to inputs, and the outputs are the products that the customer values, while the customers are the final users of the processed outputs. SIPOC can be viewed as a high level map of processes that are used to define the phase of process improvement as it will aid the plant understand what the scope of the process is (Allen, 2010: p24). It acts as an initial point for the identification of the customer’s voice. It will give the plant insight into vital inputs of a process, which has a significant effect on the output. SIPOC should be created as a group activity, which needs brainstorming to uncover the hidden details regarding the reason why the customers are not making repeat orders. This team should consist of all stakeholders in the process being put under consideration. Brainstorming can be carried out iteratively for every element of SIPOC, with the idea being to move backwards from the customer to the supplier (Allen, 2010: p25). During the discovery, as well as documentation of the processes at the plant, SIPOC is created from the definition of the process to the identification of the outputs, the customers, inputs, and finally the suppliers. In this case, the suppliers are those who provide the material for building the pumps, as well as the spare parts for the same pumps. The suppliers could be individuals, vendors, or even government institutions. Additionally, the supplier could also be the customer. The inputs for the plant include the materials needed to make the pumps and services required by the process. These can even include factors that influence the pump making process. For example, temperature control is important when putting in the rivets or tightening nuts. The process can be defined by identifying the key processes in pump making and their sequence. These steps need to be written down in a verb-object format with the addition of contextually appropriate modifiers like adverbs and adjectives (Gygi et al, 2008: p43). At this stage, it is also vital that the process boundaries are established, i.e. the event that triggers the process and that which marks the end of a particular process (Gygi et al, 2008: p43). In this case, the process starts with receiving the inputs from the supplier and ends with a successful sale of the pumps after processing. Some important processes to be considered include; assembling, fixing, quality checks, and packaging. The outputs to be considered are typically the product that is produced through the execution of the process. In this case, the output is the final product that is ready for sale to the customer. Another problem facing the plant is the uncertain future in market demand from customers for their pumps. This problem can be tackled using Total Quality Management, or TQM. TQM is a future management tool whose application is wider than simply the assurance of product quality. It acts as a tool of managing the business processes and people so as to ascertain the satisfaction of the customer at all stages, both externally and internally (Ross, 2009: p33). Combined with effective leadership from the plant manager and the deputy, the results will be the plant doing things right at the first time of trying. TQM’s core is the customer-supplier interface, internally and externally, with a number of processes lying at every interface. This must be accompanied by a commitment to quality, the communication of the quality message, recognizing that the plant’s culture needs to change in order to create total quality (Ross, 2009: p34). This will act as the foundations of Total Quality management with support from the key functions of management including systems, processes and people. Quality can be defined as delighting the client by meeting their expectations and needs fully. These could include price, cost effectiveness, maintainability, reliability, delivery, availability, appearance and performance. It is imperative, therefore, that the plant finds out what these expectations and needs are. After their identification, the plant’s management must understand them, as well as measure their ability to meet them. Quality begins with market research in order to establish the requirements for their products and the customer’s real needs. However, for the plant to be successful, the quality needs to span across all functions, people, departments and activities. Everyone at the interface needs to cooperate in order to achieve a plant with total quality, for example, the way the Japanese are able to achieve this with controls that are companywide (Ross, 2009: p35). There are interfaces in existence across all departments, offices, homes, series of clients, and suppliers. These can be referred to as the quality chains that a person can break or piece of equipment that does not meet the client’s requirement. This failure will trickle down to the crossing point between the company and its external customers. Any failure to meet the requirements during any phase of the quality chain can multiply, with failure in one phase leading to problems in another phase that might drastically change and lead to more problems and failures elsewhere, which exacerbates the whole situation (Ross, 2009: p36). The ability to meet the external and internal requirements of the customer is vital in this case. For the achievement of quality across an organization, all the people across the quality chain need to be trained to enquire some things regarding all customer-supplier interfaces (Ross, 2009: p36). These are who the customers are, what their true expectations and needs are, how to find out what these requirements and needs are, and how these abilities to meet the requirements and needs can be measured. Additionally, concerning the customer, they need to ask if they have the capability to meet the customer’s expectations and needs and if this is not the case, identify what they need to do to improve their capability. Do they meet the expectations and needs of the customers regularly? If not, what prevents it from happening, with the existence the capabilities, to do so? Finally, how can they monitor changes in expectations and needs of the customer? Concerning both external and internal suppliers, the plant’s management should ask themselves about their internal suppliers, what their true expectations and needs are how to communicate their expectations and needs to suppliers, and ask whether the suppliers possess the capability to measure, as well as meet, the expectations and needs (Ross, 2009: p 38). Finally, they should come up with a way of informing the suppliers of changes in their expectations and needs. As well as being in the loop regarding the requirements and needs of the customer, everyone must respect the requirements and needs of the supplier. An ideal situation would be a partnership relationship style where the parties share and benefit from each other’s preferences. Report to Divisional Director Outline In order to solve the conundrum facing the organization, the leadership at the plant must step up. Effective leadership begins with a mission statement, which is followed by a strategy, which, in turn, is translated down through the plant into action plans. Combined with a TQM approach, this will result in a quality plant that has a satisfied customer base with good business results. Effective leaders will be required to; Develop and publish corporate objectives, values and beliefs, often written down as a mission statement. Be personally involved and act as role models in order for a culture of total quality to flourish. Constantly review and improve the system of management. Communicate, motivate, and support people, as well as encourage participation of employees. The implementation of TMQ can be a daunting task and as managers the things that we need to consider are; The organization must make a long-term commitment towards continuous improvement of product and service quality. Adoption of a zero defects philosophy of changing the culture at the plant and getting it right the first time. Train the plant’s employees to understand the relationship between customer and the supplier. Desist from purchasing inputs based on price alone but rather, the total cost. Recognize the importance of improving systems and their management. Eliminate fear among the employees by adopting modern methods of training and supervising. Develop a systematic methodology to the management of TQM implementation. References Allen, Theodore. Introduction to Engineering Statistics and Lean Sigma. New York: Springer May , 2010. Gygi, Craig. Neil, DeCarlo. & Bruce, Williams. Six sigma for dummies. Hoboken: Wiley Pub., cop., 2008. Ross, Joel. Total quality management. Boca Raton: St. Lucie Press, 2009. Read More