Section 5 - Operations Management Flashcards
What is operations management?
The department responsible for the transformation of inputs into outputs.
What is involved in the manufacturing process?
- Inputs (raw materials/ideas + thoughts)
- Transformation process, manufacturing (raw materials converted to goods with aid of technology)
- Outputs (finished goods)
What is job production?
Where one off tailor made products are made from start to finish; labour intensive
What is batch production?
Where products are made in groups with the same operation being carried out on all products in a batch. Same equipment, different ingredients; capital intensive
What is flow/mass production?
Every product Is identical; uses technology and production takes place 24 hours a day; capital intensive
What are the advantages of job production?
- Unique
- Higher quality
- Personal, as customer wants it
- Skilled staff
- High job satisfaction
- Niche market, loyal customers
- Charge high prices, profit
What are the disadvantages of job production?
- Expensive
- Time consuming to produce
- Only target a small group of people
- Pay high wages
- Small quantities produced
What are the advantages of batch production?
- Make more at once; quicker + cheaper
- Make a variety of products using same machinery (cheaper)
What are the disadvantages of batch production?
- Errors mean entire batch wasted
- Time lost between batches
- Stock of raw materials
- Demotivating due to capital intensiveness
What are the advantages of flow/mass production?
- Cheaper to produce
- Quicker to produce
- Relatively easy to produce
- Limited wages
- All products the same; identical
What are the disadvantages of flow/mass production?
- Machinery expensive
- Demotivating to staff (all machinery, capital intensive)
- No variety
- Sell cheap so low profit margins
What issues may arise during the production process?
- Machinery faults
- Faulty batch
- Changeover time
- Staff
- Changing materials used (when changing product in batch)
What factors need to be considered when deciding on a production method?
- Selling price
- Product (ease to manufacture, labour/capital intensive needs to be unique?)
- Audience (niche or mass?)
- Quality
- Volume (demand)
- Time
What impact is there on a business if their products are low quality?
- Reputation, customer feedback
- Less people want to work for you (poor staff retention)
- Profit decreases
- Cost of recalls
- Less customers/sales
- High refunds
- Wasted materials
- Lawsuits (injury from poor quality products?)
- Cost of repairs/remakes
What is business ethics?
Doing right by customer/society
