Application of Operation Management at Apple, Inc - Case Study Example

Download file to see previous pages Founded in 1976 from a garage in Palo Alto California, Apple, Inc. is a corporation engaged in the design, manufacture, and sales of consumer electronic products (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011). The company’s history is dominated by its visionary founder Steve Jobs whose return to the company in 1996 marked the company’s rise to the position as the most valued company in the world. The preceding brief summary has been brought forth because Apple has three distinct periods. The first is marked by 1976 to 1985, the period of Jobs leadership before leaving the company (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011). The second period marks the gradual decline of the company from 1985 through 1996 when Apple almost filed for bankruptcy (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011). As the above clearly reveals, Apple prospered under the leadership of Steve Jobs and it is this foundation that is the core of this examination of the company’s operation management. The above currently is an issue for the company since his passing. For decades analysts have lamented over the fact Steve Jobs was the singular creative driving force behind the company’s innovations (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011). Hailed as the company’s visionary, Jobs and the board of directors were aware of this dependency of one man as the chief architect (Securities and Exchange Commission, 2011). Apple, Inc. was the creation and development of the mind of Steve Jobs who took the company from the brink of potential bankruptcy to the world’s leading company in slightly over a decade. The current organization chart looks like that of any successful multinational, but as shall be demonstrated herein the company has the mark of its former founder. This represents the crux of the management issue, as innovation is the reason for and behind the success of the company. This shall be examined in this report, that seeks to ascertain how the management of the company can address this core issue. As a point of clarification, the business process of an organization (also referred to as business method) is the collection, structures and related activities/tasks a company uses to produce its products or service (Van der Aaist et al, 2003). In the case of Apple, this is an extremely involved and complex area as the company is the only fully vertically integrated consumer electronics company in the industry (Johnson and Christensen, 200611). The above means Apple’s management controls all of the important processes of the business needed to produce its products and software (Johnson and Christensen, 2006). In examining the core business process of Apple, one would normally treat its vertical integration as one unit, when in fact the company actually represents five companies in one. The above areas are innovation and customer design leading to new products, design, and manufacture of internal components such as the processor chip in the iPad, software design and development, internal manufacturing control of cases, parts and components along with direct sales and mass marketing (Johnson and Christensen, 2006). Rather than approach the above from the five individual business processes, the operating mode of Apple has always been introducing innovative new consumer products (Johnson and Christensen, 2006). ...Download file to see next pagesRead More