Production and Operations Management in Williamsons Joinery - Essay Example

Production and Operations Management in Williamson’s Joinery and Furniture Introduction In 1950’s Bill Williamson established the company Williamson’s Joinery and Furniture which was purely into furniture and joinery designs. The company was highly focused on the manufacturing of timber furniture and other joineries including the staircases. It was been started in the New South Wales and in 1990’s the company was taken over by Elspeth cook. With the change in leadership the company’s business also changed as in the time of Bill the company was into manufacturing of only standard furniture’s and joinery’s but because of the increasing trend in custom furniture Elspeth started the company’s business in making custom furniture as well. The company always focused on the high quality of the products that they offered to the customer and also had high focus on the craftsmanship that was been used over the products where of unique designs and also made very carefully. The company faced a lot of problems related to the inventory management and storage of items as the space in the company got occupied by huge storage of goods as a result the company was incurring huge loss. Though because of the high sales of the custom furniture’s the company was able to make up its cost but slowly the operational cost increased to a great value and it started affecting the company’s performance in many ways like by increasing the lead times, reducing the capacity, increasing the overall cost, storage issues etc. This report covers the overall performance of the company in the way it produces its goods including its operational process and layouts, identification of the problems that the company is facing and the specifications of those problems by going into the root cause of the problem and also the impact of these problems over the day-to-day operation of the company. All these are been analysed using various concepts of production and operation management to understand the effect of wrong management and the problems that the happen causing a huge impact on the whole operation of the company. Discussion Technical analysis According to Tompkins and White in 2003 the impact of the material flow does have an effect from the way the layout s been designed, while Chhajed, Montreuil in 1992 exclaimed that the complexity of the layout design affects in the production process in a huge way. In 1997, Heragu explained that the layouts in the company are generally made based on the flow of the materials between the various facilities in the company. It is been decided based on the space available for each facility, looking at the budget of the company, examining the requirement of the presence of the requirements adjacent to each other (Menezes, 2012, pp. 45-46). From the time Elspeth became the head of the company more importance was been given to the custom furniture trade and at the same time the joinery side of the business kept declining slowly. The company currently has a single manufacturing unit in Cooma in New South Wales. Both the standard and custom furniture’s were been made in the same unit. Highly efficient and expensive machines were been used to provide good flexibility in producing the custom furniture’s. The layout used by the company suited the production of high variety of products and the equipment’s are been kept in group based on their functions rather than the process where they are been required like all the lathe machines were kept in one place, all the saw machines kept in another place, cutting machines in one place etc. The company’s layout was based on batch production where the company used to produce a batch of similar products in a line moving the materials from one machine to another as per the process which were kept in different places (Márquez, Machuca, and López, 2012, pp. 57-63). The CNC router is been kept in the central are away from the main operational place. The company has enabled all the systems with dust extraction systems and also the paint and lacquer booths were been located in the back of the factory with fume and particle extraction system so that a good and healthy work environment is been created in the company’s surroundings. The various parts of the furniture’s are brought together in the final assembly zone where the parts are combined together to form the final product. The assembly line used for staircases was the biggest one. In 1996, Meller and Gau, when the company has a block layout where each department is in separate blocks the output is obtained after a long time, in this case that particular company can use the detailed layout which will specify the exact locations, input/output point, aisle structures, the location of the machines and other areas in each department which will help in proper movement of the materials and the output will be obtained quickly. This brass plaque is been attached only to the products which has completely satisfied the high standards of quality. Each product produced in the company reflects the quality of wood that is been used to make it and the amount of high skilled craftsmanship of the individual workers in the company. The company has the same craftsman for crafting both the standard and also the custom furniture’s (Santos, Gohr and Vieira Junior, 2012, pp. 23-26). Problem identification and specification In 1977, Green, Newsom, and Jones after surveying the American Fortune 500 companies got the information with regard to the use of quantitative techniques for analysing a particular problem or situation. They say that most of the companies never used quantitative techniques as they were not aware of these techniques and because of the lack of knowledge in product and operations management the companies were not able to understand the correlation and the problems that were been rising in their company. Castillo and Westerlund in 2005 explained the objective for the problem related to layout is to minimize the cost that is there in associating different departments involved in the project. This interaction may have the material handling cost and other factors related to the flow of the materials between the departments. According to them this is dependent on basically two factors floor area and the number of departments (Yalabik, Howard and Roden, 2012, pp. 18-24). In this case with the increasing demand of the custom furniture’s and especially with the increasing demand from the Megan’s shop the company started to increase its rate for production which did lead to overproduction of the goods. Among the seven dangerous wastes or MUDA’s in any manufacturing company overproduction is one of the major wastage that a company can incur and it affects in a huge way in the overall business of the company. The company’s decision to produce the furniture’s in small batch did increase the overall output of the company. With the company’s overall space being the same and the production going on increasing the company did start to affect the company in a huge way. The stock maintenance became a huge problem for the company as the stocks kept on pilling in the store (Lambrecht, Creemers, Boute and Leus, 2012, pp. 43-47). Apart from this overproduction the other problem that did creep up for the company was that with the growing concentration over the custom furniture’s the production of the standard products came down as a result of which the work in progress materials of the standard products got stuck in middle and it took a lot of space to even store those items. This became another problem for the company as the stocks from all sides kept on increasing reducing the space for storing the items in the stores. The production scheduling also got hampered as the custom furniture’s were given more importance than the standard one’s. The goods were kept in the stores in an ad hoc manner which leads to some defects in the products also and it was a big loss for the company (Piercy, Jones, Jones and Campbell, 2012, pp. 63-69). The company faced a lot of problem as they have increased the capacity but the space in the factory remained same and it does affect the company in its performance in a huge way (Bamford, Karjalainen and Jenavs, 2012, pp. 33-37). Day-to-day operational issues The company did face a lot of problems with the increasing stock and make it more difficult for the company to handle the overall operation and not incur too much loss for the company. The increasing store occupancy does affect the financial condition of the company as more and more amount of money is locked up in the stores and this leads n increasing the amount of cost for the company. The employees find it difficult to move in the factory because of the less space as all the raw materials, work in progress and the finished goods are kept in the factory in ad hoc manner which occupies lots of space (Walker, Klassen, Sarkis and Seuring, 2014, pp. 54-60). The company to overcome the problem of stock keeping in the store looks to take warehouse on rent which does affects in a huge way as this will increase the cost of operation for the company as hiring the warehouse will be too costly for the company. The lead time in the production of the standard and custom furniture’s has also increased in a huge way as a result of which the delivery of the products to the customers does get delayed. Companies lacking in delivering the goods in time to the customer will affect the company in a huge way as the company will lose its brand image and in the long run the customers will look to shift to take products from other companies and that will affect the company in holding on to their customers. This will affect the company in its growth process as a result will affect in a huge way in the work environment and the employees will be very disappointed because of the decline. This might also lead to a decline in the productivity of the employees and thus many of the employees might even lose their jobs because of the continuous loss that the company might incur because of overproduction and also because of wrong planning and scheduling of the overall production process. With the increasing completion in the market and many companies coming up with better quality products the company will lose a huge market share and also find it very difficult to gain the customer satisfaction again. These issues will affect the overall performance of the company in a huge way and lead to a huge loss for the company in its performance and also in the financial way. Broader organisational issues caused by operational problems With the increasing capacity and less space in the company premises the space for keeping the materials is very less and the place for having a good production system with batch type layout is also minimised and the company will find it difficult to have a good production process and the material flow will get affected in a huge way as moving the materials from one machine to other will be very difficult because of less space in the factory (Brown, Bessant and Lamming, 2013, pp. 56-59). Because of these problems the marketing team will find it difficult to increase the sales of the products and get more customers as the companies brand image will be affected in a huge way and customers will look to find better choices from other companies and for the marketing team even after conducting many promotions it will be difficult to attract customer as they will not be able to provide quality products in the right time. The biggest strength of the company is its quality products but with these problems the quality of the product will be affected in a big way as the company will not able to maintain the same quality neither will be able to provide the products in the right time to the customer. These problems which came up in the company because of wrong production planning did affect a lot as they were not having enough space to store the raw materials, work in progress and finished goods as a result the cost of storing these material goes on increasing leading to the increase in the cost of the company affecting them in a huge way in the profit margin. In this case for the company the quality of the products has always been of the highest priority and the mark for the high quality product is the little brass plaque that is been attached to all the finished products. Conclusion Thus looking at this case it can be seen that ignoring the proper planning and scheduling of the production process does affect the company in a huge way. It does increases the number of wastes in the company and with the wastage of overproduction the company faces a lot of problem with respect to store the overproduced items and also leads to overuse of the resources and as a result of which the company faces a loss in their finance. The net revenue of the company goes down in a huge way and does affects a lot in the profit margin of the company. The company looking to increase its sales by increasing its production does affects the overall process of the company and all the departments are been affected because of it. The wrong utilisation of the space has made the company space very congested and as a result of which the material flow has been very inefficient and it does affects the quality of production as well in a huge way . 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