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MBA OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES
ASSIGNMENT QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
MBA Assignment
Subject
: Operations Management
Answers with Sample
Assignment
Brief:
·
Topic: Operations Management Assignment
·
Document
Type: MBA – 2 Case Studies
(Part A and Part B) and Questions and Answers based Assignment (Part C)
·
Subject: Operations Management
·
Number
of Words: 10,000 words
·
Citation/Referencing
Style: Harvard (in-text +
citation)
Requirement:
1.
For Questions & Answers Based Assignment (Part C)
·
Introduction is
needed for each question.
·
Question has to
be answered with references if any idea or information is taken from other
source.
Note: Brief Introduction&
Conclusion/Summary are needed for each question.
·
References
(in-text + citation) to be used – Harvard style
2.
Case study (Part A and Part B) should contain:
1.
1.
Executive summary
2.
Table of content
3.
Introduction
4.
Body of
assignment (questions related to case need to be answered)
Note: Brief
Introduction& Conclusion/Summary are needed for each question.
1.
1.
Conclusion /
Recommendation if any
References (in-text + citation) to
be used – Harvard style
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Assignment
Part A
(total words: 3,500)
When you think of a hospital, what comes to mind? Patients,
emergency rooms, technology and medical advancements. Making the sick and
injured well again. When officials at Virginia Mason think of hospitals, they
think of cars. A car manufacturing plant, to be exact. Beginning in 2000 the
hospital’s leaders looked at their infrastructure and saw it was designed
around them, not the patient, said Dr. Gary Kaplan, Virginia Mason’s chairman
and chief executive officer. F or example, you hurry up and be on time, only to
wait for the physician to see you. They began looking for a better way to
improve quality, safety and patient satisfaction. After two years of searching,
they discovered the Toyota Production System, also known as lean manufacturing.
Developed in part by Japanese businessman Taiichi Ohno, the idea is to
eliminate waste and defects in production. Virginia Mason has tailored the
Japanese model to fit health care. Kaplan and other Virginia Mason managers
took their first trip to Japan in 2002 where they visited manufacturing plants
such as Toyota and Yamaha.
Nearly 200 employees have toured
plants in Japan and a ninth trip is planned for this summer. While Virginia
Mason couldn’t say exactly how much they paid over the years to send the staff
overseas, officials liken it to leadership training other companies pay for their
employees. They say the benefits offset the costs. “‘People are not cars’ is
very common for me to hear,” Kaplan said. We get so wrapped up in the
seriousness and specialness of health care, but we also have to open our eyes
to other industries—we’re way behind in information specialists and taking
waste out of our process.
Toyota is obsessed with the
customer and customer satisfaction . . . all those things Toyota was about was
what we wanted.” So what does that mean? There are seven wastes, according to
the production system. One is wasting time, such as patients waiting for a
doctor or for test results to come back. Others are inventory waste—having more
materials and nformation than is necessary—and overproduction waste,
producing more than is necessary. Take, for example, stockpiling brochures and
pamphlets in storage closets. They take up space. There is wasted cost to make
so many pamphlets that aren’t needed. The hospital and all of its campuses in
the Seattle area implemented a Kanban system, which signals the need to
restock. Kanban, which means “visual card” in Japanese, uses exactly that—a
card put near the bottom of a pile of tongue dispensers, gauze strips or
brochures, for example.
When a nurse or physician sees the
card, he or she knows it’s time to refill. Supplies don’t run out, but they
also aren’t over-ordered. The hospital created standardized instrument trays
for surgeries and procedures, which saved several hundred dollars by no longer
setting out extra instruments no one used. Unused but opened instruments have
to be thrown away. I t takes a series of simple steps to make improvements,
said Janine Wentworth, an administrative director who returned from a two-week
trip to Japan last month. One example is the development of a flip chart
showing the level of mobility in physical therapy patients. The chart shows the
appropriate picture of what the patient can do, and each nurse or physician who
comes in the room doesn’t have to waste time searching charts or asking
questions.
Went worth also wants to implement
a production plan to hire more staff before a shortage exists based on turnover
rates on any given hospital floor. Another adaptation from the Toyota model is
a patient safety alert system. At the manufacturing plant, if there’s a problem,
the whole line is stopped and the problem is fixed immediately. Virginia
Mason’s practice had been to identify and fix problems after the fact, perhaps
leading to mistakes recurring many times before a solution was found. The alert
system allows nurses and physicians to signal a problem when it happens and fix
it immediately. Virginia Mason’s Kirkland site has about 10 alerts each day.
The Kirkland campus implemented the Toyota model in 2003. They’ve reduced
appointment and telephone delays by having medical assistants handle incoming
calls, instead of medically untrained operators.
Also, instead of doctors waiting
until the end of the day to go through a stack of patient records, they now
write comments and recommendations immediately after seeing the patient before
going to see the next one. The time saved increases the time a physician can
spend with a patient. Dr. Kim Pittenger, medical director at Virginia Mason
Kirkland, said most of the cost of medical care involves clogs in the flow of
information—paper forms, lab results, phone messages, often leading to
irritated patients. Working the backlog down costs more than if you never let
things pile up in the first place, he said.
He said not everyone has agreed
with the new system and a few physicians have left Virginia Mason because of
it. “ To some it seems like obsessive-compulsive disorder run amok, but it’s
part of a solution that eliminates mistakes,” Pittenger said. Other hospitals,
including Swedish Medical Center, have incorporated the lean system into parts
of their operation. Virginia Mason said overall benefits include an 85 percent
reduction in how long patients wait to get lab results back, and lowering
inventory costs by $1 million. They’ve redesigned facilities to make patient
and staff workflow more productive. The hospital reduced overtime and temporary
labor expenses by $500,000 in one year and increased productivity by 93
percent. While direct cost savings aren’t passed on to patients with the new
system, less waiting, increased safety and more efficient care are.
Kaplan’s vision is to have
patients start their appointment in the parking garage with a smart card that
triggers their entire appointment process. No more waiting rooms, just move
directly from the garage to an examination room. Total flow—no waiting, no
waste and it’s all about the patient. “We have more than enough resources in
health care,” Kaplan said. “We just need to stop wasting it and only do what’s
appropriate and value-added and we’d save billions.” Source: Cherie Black, “To
Build a Better Hospital, Virginia Mason Takes Lessons from Toyota Plant,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 15, 2008. Copyright © 2008. Used with
permission.
Questions:
1.
What are the
wastes identified by the hospital management in their health facility?
2.
How approaches
did the hospital management embrace to address these wastes using
3.
Toyota way?
4.
What are the
similarities between the hospital and cars that made management adopt
5.
Toyota way in
improvement?
6.
What is lean
methodology and what are its principles? Does Lean affect performance? Is
7.
there evidence
from literature of its impact on performance, competitiveness and cost
8.
reductions?
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Part B
(total words: 3,500)
The Boeing Company, headquartered
in Chicago, Illinois, is one of the two major producers of aircraft in the
global market. The other major producer is European Airbus. Boeing produces
three models in Everett, Washington: 747s, 767s, and 777s. The planes are all
produced in the same building. At any one time, there may be as many as six
planes in various stages of production. Obviously the building has to be fairly
large to accommodate such a huge undertaking. In fact, the building is so large
that it covers over 98 acres and it is four stories high, making it the largest
building by volume in the world. It is so large that all of Disneyland would
fit inside, and still leave about 15 acres for indoor parking! The windowless
building has six huge doors along one side, each about 100 yards wide and 40
yards high (the size of a football field)—large enough to allow a completed
airplane to pass through. Boeing sells airplanes to airlines and countries
around the globe.
There isn’t a set price for the
planes; the actual price depends on what features the customer wants. Once the
details have been settled and an order submitted, the customer requirements are
sent to the design department. Design Designers formerly had to construct a
mock-up to determine the exact dimensions of the plane and to identify any
assembly problems that might occur. That required time, materials, labor, and
space. Now they use computers (CAD) to design airplanes, avoiding the cost of
the mock ups and shortening the development time. The Production Process Once
designs have been completed and approved by the customer, production of the
plane is scheduled, and parts and materials are ordered. Parts come to the plant
by rail, airplane, and truck, and are delivered to the major assembly area of
the plane they will be used for.
The parts are scheduled so they
arrive at the plant just prior to when they will be used in assembly, and
immediately moved to storage areas close to where they will be used.
Time-phasing shipments to arrive as parts are needed helps to keep inventory
investment low and avoids having to devote space to store parts that won’t be
used immediately. There is a trade off, though, because if any parts are
missing or damaged and have to be reordered, that could cause production
delays. When missing or defective parts are discovered, they are assigned
priorities according to how critical the part is in terms of disruption of the
flow of work. The parts with the highest priorities are assigned to expediters
who determine the best way to replace the part. The expediters keep track of
the progress of the parts and deliver them to the appropriate location as soon
as they arrive. In the meantime, a portion of the work remains unfinished,
awaiting the replacement parts, and workers complete other portions of the
assembly. If the supplier is unable to replace the part in a time frame that
will not seriously delay assembly, as a last resort, Boeing has a machine shop
that can make the necessary part. The partially assembled portions of the
plane, and in later stages, the plane itself, move from station to station as
the work progresses staying about five days at each station.
Giant overhead cranes are used to
move large sections from one station to the next, although once the wheel
assemblies have been installed, the plane is towed to the remaining stations.
Finished planes are painted in one of two separate buildings. Painting usually
adds 400 to 600 pounds to the weight of a plane. The painting process involves
giving the airplane a negative charge and the paint a positive charge so that
the paint will be attracted to the airplane. Testing and Quality Control Boeing
has extensive quality control measures in place throughout the entire design
and production process. Not only are there quality inspectors, individual
employees inspect their own work and the work previously done by others on the
plane. Buyers’ inspectors also check on the quality of the work.
There are 60 test pilots who fly
the planes. Formerly planes were tested to evaluate their flight worthiness in
a wind tunnel, which required expensive testing and added considerably to
product development time. Now new designs are tested using a computerized wind
tunnel before production even begins, greatly reducing both time and cost. And
in case you’re wondering, the wings are fairly flexible; a typical wing can
flap by as much as 22 feet before it will fracture. Re-engineering Boeing is
re-engineering its business systems. A top priority is to upgrade its computer
systems. This will provide better links to suppliers, provide more up-to-date
information for materials management, and enable company representatives who
are at customer sites to create a customized aircraft design on their laptop
computer. Another aspect of the re engineering involves a shift to lean
production. Key goals are to reduce production time and reduce inventory.
Boeing wants to reduce the time
that a plane spends at each workstation from 5 days to 3 days, a reduction of
40 percent. Not only will that mean that customers can get their planes much
sooner, it will also reduce labor costs and inventory costs, and improve cash
flow. One part of this will be accomplished by moving toward late-stage customization,
or delayed differentiation. That would mean standardizing the assembly of
planes as long as possible before adding custom features. This, and other
time-saving steps, will speed up production considerably, giving it a major
competitive advantage. It also wants to reduce the tremendous amount of
inventory it carries (a 747 jumbo jet has about 6 million parts, including 3
million rivets). One part of the plan is to have suppliers do more pre-delivery
work by assembling the parts into kits that are delivered directly to the
staging area where they will be installed on the aircraft instead of delivering
separate parts to inventory. That would cut down on inventory carrying costs
and save time. Boeing is also hoping to reduce the number of suppliers it has,
and to establish better links and cooperation from suppliers. Currently Boeing
has about 3,500 suppliers. Compare that with GM’s roughly 2,500 suppliers, and
you get an idea of how large this number is.
Questions:
1.
Analyze Boeing
strategy in the location selection and layout of the venue where the airplanes
are manufactured
2.
What is the type
of inventory management does Boeing embrace? How does Boeing manage its
inventory? Why it is important to manage inventory?
3.
Describe and
critique the company’s strategy to overcome delays in manufacturing.
4.
What other
strategies Boeing is planning to implement to cut cycle times?
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Part C
(total words: 3,000, for each question:
1,500 words)
Answer any one of the following
questions:
1.
What are the
differences between modern customization in operations management and the
concept of Ford’s assembly line? Which one address more appropriately the
volatility of global markets?
2.
“Taylorism is
based on the belief that improving the internal capacity of the company through
competent, skilled and trained staff and through specialization and labor
division are the key to higher performance. Nevertheless, it does not consider
the changes that occur outside the company in the market. Does Taylorism exhibit
a gap in strategic operations management which can be complemented by
customization and global strategies? Discuss this assumption.
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