Process Design in Operations Management free essay sample

1. Introduction 1. 1 Blantyre Adventist Hospital Blantyre Adventist Hospital (BAH) is a 35-bed hospital with outpatient clinics and two operating theaters located in Blantyre which is one of Malawi’s commercial cities. It is a private hospital which is run by the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Malawi. The hospital employees more than six hundred people including doctors and nurses. 1. 2 Bakers Pride Limited Bakers Pride Limited is a confectionery company baking bread, rolls, cakes, pies and pastries. Bread is the company’s main product and is sold to a cross section of customers who take it along with tea for their breakfast. The company’s products are sold through supermarkets, food shops, grocery stores and the company’s own shops which sell bread sandwiches, snacks for take-out or on-premise consumption with tea or soft drinks. 1. Differences between Blantyre Adventist Hospital and Bakers Pride Limited The following presentation compares and contrasts Blantyre Adventist Hospital which is basically a services output organisation and Bakers Pride Limited which is a product output organisation in the following areas: 1. We will write a custom essay sample on Process Design in Operations Management or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The process of transformation of inputs to outputs . Process and capacity design. 3. Supply chain management. 4. Scheduling. 2. 1. The process of transformation of inputs to outputs The creation of goods or services involves transforming or converting inputs into outputs. (William J. Stevenson 8th Ed. : 4). 2. 1. 1 Inputs The inputs for the two organizations include employees, facilities, buildings, equipment, laboratories, capital, energy, information and managerial. Some of these inputs are standardized for a particular organization while others are common in both organizations. For example, Bakers Pride has High-speed machinery which can accomplish the kneading and ripening processes in a matter of seconds while as Blantyre Adventist Hospital has equipments like anaesthesia machines, vital signs monitor surgical tables. These equipments are for specific purposes within their organisations but their degree of flexibility is not the same. For example the equipments for Bakers Pride are specifically for production of bread and other confectioneries while the equipments for Blantyre Adventist Hospital can be used on many patients according to doctors’ need for specific information. This also shows that the equipments used at Blantyre Adventist Hospital are mostly used to provide information to the doctors while the equipments used at Bakers Pride Limited are for production of goods. The inputs for Apart from sliced white bread, the company also offers myriad wheat breads and multigrain breads and snacks. Raw Materials In producing its products, Bakers Pride uses three basic ingredients: grain, water, and bakers yeast. The grain is ground according to the type of bread being made. All grains are composed of three parts: bran (the hard outer layer), germ (the reproductive component), and endosperm (the soft inner core). All three parts are ground together to make whole wheat and rye breads. To make white flour, the bran and the germ must be removed. Since bran and germ contain much of the nutrients in grain, the white flour is often enriched with vitamins and minerals. Some white flour has also been fortified with fiber and calcium. The grinding of the grain takes place at grain mills and then sold to the bakery in bulk. The bakery keeps the grains in storage sacks until they are ready to be used. In the baking factory, water and yeast are mixed with the flour to make dough. Additional ingredients such as salt, fat, sugar, honey, raisins and nuts are also added in the factory. The Manufacturing Process Mixing and kneading the dough Supply Chain Management Supply chain management is the coordination of production, inventory, location and transportation among the participants in a supply chain to achieve the best mix of responsiveness and for the market being served media. wiley. com/product data/excerpt/72/04712351/0471235172. pdf accessed on 30th June, 2011media. wiley. com/product data/excerpt/72/04712351/0471235172. pdf accessed on 30th June, 2011 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PRODUCTS AND SERVICES 1. Degree of customer contact By its nature, services at BAH involve a much higher degree of customer contact than manufacturing. The performance of a service often occurs at the point of consumption. For example a surgery at BAH requires the presence of the surgeon and the patient. On the other hand, manufacturing allows a separation between production and consumption. This means that manufacturing process of Bakers, Pride Bakery can occur away from the consumer. 2. Uniformity of input Service operations are subject to greater variability of inputs than typical manufacturing operations. Each patient at the hospital presents a specific problem that has to be diagnosed before it can be treated and remedied. Manufacturing operations often have the ability to carefully control the amount of variability of inputs and thus achieve low variability in outputs. Consequently, job requirements for Bakers’ Pride are more uniform than services at BAH. 3. Labour content of jobs. Services at BAH involve a higher labour content than products of Baker’s Pride. 4. Uniformity of output. Due to higher automation in processing its products at Baker’s Pride, there is low variability and processing tends to be smooth and efficient. At BAH, activities sometimes appear to be slow and awkward although in some instances the processing is automated for example in identifying the patient’s records. As a result output is more variable. . Measurement of productivity. Measurement of productivity at Baker’s Pride is more straightforward due to the high degree of uniformity of most products. At BAH variations in demand intensity and in requirements from job to job productivity measurement considerably more difficult. For example productivity of two doctors. One may have a large number of routine cases like laboratory tests or ex r ay while the other will not have all these routines. Productivity of the two doctors will appear different and difficult to measure. 6. Production and delivery. Patients receive the services as they are being performed. Bakery products can be stored are transported between geographical areas. 7. Quality assurance. Quality assurance is more challenging in services where production and consumption occur at the same time. Moreover, the higher variability of input creates additional opportunity for the quality of output to suffer unless quality assurance is actively managed. Quality at the point of creation is typically more evident for services than for manufacturing where errors can be corrected before the customer receives the output. 8. Amount of inventory. Manufacturing systems usually have more inventories on hand (e. g. raw materials, finished goods) than service organizations. Nonetheless, both Baker’s Pride and BAH carry at least some items in inventory that are necessary for the operation of their business (e. g. office supplies). Hence, in spite of differing inventory requirements, managers for both BAH and Baker’s Pride make decisions concerning inventory (e. g. which items to stock, how much, when to reorder). Process and capacity design Process selection refers to deciding on the way production of goods or services will be organized. It has major implications for capacity planning, layout of facilities, equipment and design of works systems (W. J. Stevenson, 5th ed. : 217). Process design is frequently a process of adopting the appropriate systems for particular circumstances and of balancing the productivity/flexibility dilemmas like creation of customer satisfaction, controlling costs, process flexibility and capital intensity. Job shop, batch and flow are viewed as the three conventional process design options and their implications for production organization and work design are generally accepted. While Blantyre Adventist Hospital uses job shop process, Bakers pride uses batch processing. Being a service organisation, Blantyre Adventist Hospital has a high variety of services which have somewhat different processing requirements. As a result the process is highly flexible and uses general- purpose equipments and mostly skilled workers like doctors and nurses. Bakers Pride on the other hand uses batch processing as the volume and variety of its products are both moderate. However the equipment is not flexible though processing is intermittent like that at Blantyre Adventist Hospital. Scheduling Scheduling is establishing the timing of the use of equipment, facilities, and human activities in an organization (Stevenson W. J. , 8th edition, 655:1). Scheduling occurs in every organization, regardless of the nature of its activities. While Bakers’ Pride must schedule production by developing schedules for workers, equipment, purchases, maintenances, and so on, BAH must schedule admissions, surgery, nursing assignments, and support services such as meal preparation, security, maintenance and cleaning. Doctors and dentists must also schedule appointments. In decision- making hierarchy, scheduling decisions are the final step in the transformation process before actual output occurs. Many decisions about system design and operation have been made long before scheduling decisions. They include the capacity of the system, equipment selection, selection and training of workers and design of products or services. Consequently scheduling decisions are made within the constraints established by many other decisions, making them fairly narrow in scope and latitude. Apart from saving costs for both Bakers’ Pride and BAH, effective scheduling in a hospital can save lives and also become a source of competitive advantage in terms of customer service (shorter wait time) if competitors are less effective with their scheduling. 1. 4. 1 Scheduling operations. The first difference in scheduling between products and services is in scheduling operation.