Operations Management - Essay Example

e continuous improvement as a never-ending process, emphasis should be given on restaurant staff, equipment, suppliers, materials (such as ingredients) and processes. Walter Shewhart has developed a circular model PDCA which can be used as a tool for continuous improvement. Another approach which Nok can adopt to emphasis on continuous improvement is to create a small team of 8-12 employees which is known as quality circles. Nok can provide the team with the required tools and techniques through which they can identify the problems and make the required changes to solve the problem (Mahadevan, 2010).

The major problem which Nok has realised that she will face is the varying demand of the customers, which will not also result in unavailability of various ingredients but will also result in wastage of unused items. Therefore, the first mission of quality circle will be to determine how to predict the demand of customers rightly and how to ensure just-in-time inventory or stock. In order to determine the solutions to the above mentioned problem, the team should meet at least twice a week for 60-90 minutes to determine the number of customers visited the restaurant during the week and the items that were requested from the menu and the ingredients that were used.

Once the quality circle gets able to solve this problem, then and only then any problem can be approached. In this way, by using these two quality management approaches, Nok will be better able to improve and ensure the quality of its products/services. Although quality management team or quality circle will be able to determine the areas where the improvements can be made to reduce the defects and problems, however, to understand the root cause of the problem, using Cause and Effect (Fishbone) Diagram can be very significant.

Since the ultimate aim of excellent operations management is to achieve the customer satisfaction, therefore, to assess the quality provided by the restaurant and to analyse the