Operation management - Essay Example

The organisation implemented a philosophy and culture which they called The Corus Way in order to sustain competitiveness, productivity and profitability. Along with this philosophy is the practice of continuous improvement programmes across the company. Specifically, this paper explores the applicability of the Corus Way and Continuous Improvement Programmes in the Port Talbot Strip Products site. The site was experiencing lost, damaged and stolen equipments in their depot operations. The problem was investigated through a structured questionnaire where the results were collated, summarised and analysed.

Using quality tools and techniques, this paper arrives at four recommendations for the improvement of the depot operations in accordance to the Corus Way. Corus Group is an international metals organization. The core competence of the company is providing steel and aluminium products and service to different market sectors. It is one of the top ten steel producers in the world. The customer base of Corus mostly comprises of businesses in the automotive, aerospace, packaging, engineering, building and construction markets.

(Datamonitor, 2008) Corus Group has operations in thirty different countries reaching over Europe, Asia and other international markets. In Europe, UK is the major market of the organization. The company is headquartered in London and employs 21,300 people in UK. (Datamonitor, 2008) Corus was created in 1999 through a merger of British Steel and Koninklijle Hoogovens, a Netherlands-based company. In 2004, Philippe Varin, CEO, initiated and launched the Restoring Success programme which aimed at closing competitive gap between Corus and the European competitors.

The program includes waste minimization and process simplification where waste is reduced and unnecessary copying of activities is eliminated.