Business Operations Flashcards
What are the production processes
- Job
- Batch
- Flow
What is job production?
- When individual products are made one at a time to meet specific customer preferences
What is batch production?
- making a set quantity of identical products, stopping, reorganising and making a batch of something else.
What is flow production?
- The continuous movement of items through the production process
How has technology affected the production process?
- using technology can help to make some tasks a lot easier and faster, although there are some disadvantages
Advantages of using technology in the production process
- Technology can carry out processes quicker and more accurately than humans
- Technology increases the productivity, and there should be a more consistent quality of products
- Machines can work 24/7, so production can be completely continuous
- Cheaper to run machines than pay humans
Disadvantages of using technology in the production process
- can be expensive to buy and install technology-
- machines require regular maintenance and updates
- if staff think that their job is at risk, they might be demotivated
- Machines are often only suited to do one task which makes them in flexible.
What are the methods of selling?
- face to face selling
- e-commerce
- telesales
Whats the importance of good customer service
To gain and retain customers
What makes good customer service
- Contribution of product knowledge
- Customer engagement
- Quick and efficient service
- Offering post-sales service
- Responding to customer feedback
What are the potential steps of a sales process
- Finding potential new customers
- approaching potential customers
- assessing the customers needs
- presenting
- closing
- follow-up (after sale)
Benefits of good customer service
- leads to high levels of customer satisfaction
- satisfied customers are likely to stay loyal and repeat purchases
- customers may be persuaded to spend more with a company that provides good customer service
Drawbacks of poor customer service
- Leads to dissatisfied customers
- Ideas of poor customer service can be spread quickly by word-of-mouth
- Poor brand image created
- less loyal customers
- leads to lower market share
What is consumer law?
- refers to any piece of government legislation
- designed to protect consumers from poor-quality products and poor business practices
- goods should meet 3 criteria
What are the 3 criteria that consumer law says products need to be.
- product should be fit for its purpose
- product should match its description
- product should be satisfactory quality
What does fit for purpose mean?
- The product does the job it was designed for
How does consumer law affect businesses?
- reputation of the business destroyed
- safety and satisfactory quality of goods need to be produced
What factors go into a business choosing where to locate?
- cost (varies in different countries)
- Location of the market, materials and labour supply
- competition
What is the role of procurement?
- identifying goods and services to buy
- choosing suppliers
- ordering goods and services
- receiving deliveries from suppliers
What does procurement mean?
Means finding and buying things that a firm needs from suppliers outside of the firm
What does logistics mean?
Means getting goods or services from one part of the supply chain to another
What does having effective procurement and logistics systems in place do for a business?
- improve the efficiency of a business- the business will have the supplies it needs at the right time- this means that there will be no breaks in production so time won’t be wasted
What does well-managed procurement and logistics do to help a firm?
- ensures products are high-quality,a reasonable price and delivered on time.
—> this improves both customer satisfaction and the firms reputation.
What do companies that manage their supply chain effectively gain?
- good relationship with suppliers- can make sure processes are being carried out in most efficient and cost-effective ways
- finding the best price value
- reducing waste and unnecessary costs- helps faster production time
