Operations and Logistics Management Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Operations and Logistics Management - Case Study Example It seeks to achieve these objectives by facilitating a culture where teams of employees are sufficiently motivated to work together to revisit working practices in an effort to monitor their performance and make changes for the better. Operations management is an area of business where one is concerned with the production of his/her goods and the services s/he provides. Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services. Usually, small businesses don't talk about "operations management", but they carry out the activities that management schools typically associate with the phrase "operations management." Major, overall activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. (These activities are also associated with Product and Service Management. However product management is usually in regard to one or more closely related product - that is, a product line. Operations management is in regard to all operations within the organization.). Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations. The best option for Organization A is the Material Requirements Planning (MRP). The MRP is a software-based production planning and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. An MRP system is intended to simultaneously meet 3 objectives: ensure materials and products are available for production and delivery to customers. maintain the lowest possible level of inventory. plan manufacturing activities, delivery schedules and purchasing activities. All manufacturing organizations, whatever their products face the same daily practical problem - that customers want products to be available in a shorter time than it takes to make them. Companies need to control the types and quantities of materials they purchase, plan which products are to be produced and in what quantities and ensure that they are able to meet current and future customer demand, all at the lowest possible cost. If a company purchases insufficient quantities of an item used in manufacturing, or the wrong item, they may be unable to meet contracts to supply products by the agreed date. If a company purchases excessive quantities of an item, money is being wasted - the excess quantity ties up cash while it remains as stock and may never even be used at all. This is a particularly severe problem for food manufacturers and companies with very short product life cycles. However, some purchased items will have a minimum quantity that must be met, therefore, purchasing e xcess is necessary. (http://www.me.utexas.edu) MRP is used by many organizations as a tool to deal with these problems. This applies to items that are bought in and to sub-assemblies that go into more complex items. There are two kinds of output. Output 1 is the "Recommended Production Schedule" which lays out a detailed schedule of the required minimum start and completion dates, with quantities, for each step of the Routing and Bill Of Material required to satisfy the demand from the MPS. Output 2 is the