Methods of Production Flashcards
What is job production?
Producing a unique single item or product to customer specifications. Often one employee completes the whole task. Usually done by small, local businesses.
Advantages of job production:
- meets customer needs exactly
- quality of work high
- easier to motivate workers
- flexibility to produce whatever is required
- little stock tied up
Disadvantages of job production:
- limited opportunity for EOS
- higher costs of production
- labour highly skilled - expensive, training
- difficult to guage costs of the job
What is batch production?
Where a set procedure is used to make batches of similar products. E.G bread, different types of bread but same procedure
Advantages of batch production?
- Quicker than job production
- Some economies of scale
- More flexibility than flow production
- Cheaper labour
Disadvantages of batch production?
- Less motivating than job production
- Downtime between batches
- More stock held
- Storage needed for stock
- Lack of variation
- Slower than mass production
What is flow/mass production?
A continuous process utilising a conveyor belt approach where the product is assembled on a production line through a series of monotonous and repetitive tasks.
Advantages of flow/mass production:
- EOS
- Large amount of goods produced quickly
- Low skill employees - cheap
- Little downtime
- Competitive - low unit costs
- Divison of labour
Limitations of flow/mass production:
- High start up costs
- Takes a lot of planning to organise
- Lacks flexibility of job production, high downtime if product changed
- Difficult to adapt to fluctuations in demand - can make it uneconomical
- Demotivating
- Large amounts of work in progress
- Reliance on suppliers to deliver on time
What is cell production?
Where employees work in teams and are responsible for the entire process of production for a product or for a section of the production for a product, often work in U shape cells
Benefits of cell production:
- Higher motivation - working in teams
- Incentive to ensure quality - responsible for product
- Opportunities for job rotation
What is division of labour?
Breaking down a job into seperate tasks, makes task easier to perform, individuals can do their part quickly but very repetitive and boring
Impact of division of labour on stakeholders?
- Shareholders increased dividends due to reduced costs
- Suppliers may get to supply more due to productivity
- Employees bored or demotivated
- Customers able to buy product cheaper
How will the decision to change the method of production be affected?
- Nature of the product
- Actual cost of machinery
- Financial situation of business
- Importance of meeting customer needs
- Degree of competition
- Objectives
- Cost of possible redundancies
