1a) Slack, Chambers, & Johnston describe five performance objectives, or factors to be considered, for job design (2007). The first of these is quality, as the ability of employees to provide high quality goods and services is impacted by job design. Certainly providing high quality grocery goods and services is important to this business. Extremely high quality can provide real differentiation for a business (Brittin, 2013). The second objective is speed. There are jobs where speed is imperative, such as emergency personnel. Although less important than in medical emergencies, speed is a factor in the grocery business, if just to keep the shelves full and avoid spoilage. Dependability is the next factor. This is very important in the grocery business, as customers are relying on the store for a basic need – food. A fourth factor is flexibility. This comes into play in the grocery business as food choices and customer tastes change. Adding new products will require flexibility on the part of the employee. The fifth element of job design is probably the most important in the grocery industry – cost. Groceries work on very thin margins in a highly competitive environment, thus every possible means of saving cost is key to job design in this industry. Health and safety is important given the hazards within the grocery business, working with heavy, unwieldy stock and many liquids. Finally, the quality of working life is a final consideration. There are many other places for grocery workers to find jobs, so to maintain high performing employees the job design should include considerations for the employee’s working life quality.
b) Influences that would help ensure shelf-stacking employees are kept motivated would be found within the behavioral approach to job design, as this kind of approach takes the employee’s motivations into account (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 2007). A first consideration is empowerment. In the context of a shelf-stacker, empowerment may be allowing the employee to have some measure of control, perhaps in the order of what gets shelved or the ability to take breaks anytime within a certain time window. The shelvers could also be presented as a team, whose job is to get everything out on the shelves by a certain time as a group and the team sets up how that is accomplished. Further, the job could have built in flexibility in job set, so that employees rotate through various jobs such as checker, stacker, back of the store, and front of the store. Also, reducing work hours has been suggested as way to increase employee satisfaction and help ensure the job survives economic changes (Balleer, 2013). The advantage to all of these approaches is that it provides the employee with some control over their job and how it is done. This is also the biggest disadvantage, as if an employee is not motivated, they may take advantage of the control to do slack work and thus lowering the quality of the service and maybe even the goods provided to the customer.
c) The following checks would determine whether the job design process was successful. First and foremost, you would need to be sure that all the performance objectives were being met from the point of view of the customer – quality, sufficient speed, dependability, and cost. This could be seen in growth in the customer base and/or sales. Next, you would check from the point of view of the employee – are the employees staying on the job, do they express having satisfaction in their job? If both these checks are positive, then the job design process has been successful.
3a) Supermarket supply chain
The diagram above exemplifies a typical supply chain for a supermarket whereby the supermarket sources out most of its items from the main warehouse .However, there are some items that are not stocked in the main warehouse and the supermarket may be required to directly outsource them from other warehouses, probably owned by producers, manufactures or even other large whole sale ventures. Items are stocked on the supermarket’s shelves and the clients hand picks them from the shelves. Customers thus form the appendage of the supply chain.
b) Vertical integration for a particular function is where a business does the function itself, internally, rather than outsourcing that is, buying the function from another provider (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 153-54). A strategic relationship is a kind of outsourcing where the other party is considered a type of business partner rather than merely a provider of services. In strategic relationships the two parties are often linked by a common financial goal and the business partner will get more than just payment for their services but could also have a share in the profit.
The primary merit of vertical integration is control of how all steps of the function is provided. It can also be cheaper depending on the function being done. The primary merit of strategic relationships is ability of each partner to focus on their specialty, the spread of the business risk, and in some cases, a reduced cost due to less need for in-house infrastructure.
c) In the supermarket industry, an option to strategic relationships is outsourcing. This is where various functions within the organization are performed by other entities, but the relationship between the primary company and the outsourcer is merely customer/provider rather than some sort of actual business relationship. Among the considerations for choosing a particular relationship is what kind of discounts (cost) would be available with each relationship, how long is it expected that the relationship would last, and how unique is the service provided by the outsourcer. If the outsourcer is one of the few providers of the needed goods or services, it may make sense to form a strategic relationship rather than go from contract to contract on an outsourcing basis (Wilding, Skipworth, & Rossi, n.d.).
4a) Stakeholders for a supermarket include owners, shareholders (if a public company), employees, suppliers, unions (if applicable), customers, community, and government if you use the definition of anyone who influences or may be influenced by the business (Slack, Chambers, & Johnson, 2007, p. 39). The primary stakeholder, however, is the owner. The ultimate goal of all stakeholders is to maximize their wealth or return on their investment as can be achieved through their relationship with the supermarket.
b) The supermarket’s performance objectives are quality, speed, dependability, flexibility, and appropriate cost (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 2007, p. 54). See question 1a) for discussion of these objectives in relation to the supermarket business.
c) Performance and stakeholder motivations can be in conflict in all objectives when what is best for the business is in conflict with what is best, personally, for the stakeholder (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 2007, p. 7). For example, an employee may feel the amount he is paid for his work is too low, yet for the business to be able to contain costs, the wage that is provided is all that can be offered. Additionally, in the supermarket business, there is sometimes a conflict between what the market can provide and what the community would prefer, particularly in low-income areas where there are high risks for theft, employee instability, and other safety issues. Ultimately, all of these conflicts need to be reconciled in favor of cost, as this is the ultimate driver for a business to be profitable and thus continue to exist to serve the stakeholders. This is part of the reason why stakeholder-based business teaching is being phased out
Operations Management
1a) There are three possible roles that operations can play in a business – an implementer, providing concrete implementation of strategy; a supporter, supporting the strategy formation; or as a driver, forcing strategy to be developed. As an operations management function grows within an organization, it provides a greater and greater contribution to the business. Thus, in the first few weeks in the role as organization management, you will need to determine what role the current organization management plays and make plans for the future. The Hayes and Wheelwright model could be used to place the current organization management role and provide goals for moving forward in your management capacity.
b) The Hayes and Wheelwright’s four-stage model examines the contribution of a particular operation on the business. The underlining philosophy of this model is that operations can provide a competitive advantage. The four stages are: 1) internally neutral, business is internally focused and reactive; 2) externally neutral, functions try to achieve industry standard; 3) internally supportive, credible support is found within the business’ strategy for its operations; and 4) externally supportive, the business has a competitive advantage due to its operations (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 2007, p 37-38). The questions would revolve around how the business and those outside of it (if stage 4) perceives the role of the business’ organizational management (Slack, N., n.d.).
2a) The five main elements of performance management are 1) Quality: the organization has to provide goods that fulfill the needs of the consumer; 2) Speed: the goods must be provided in the time required by the consumer; 3) Dependability: the organization has to be reliable in its promises, communications, and actions for the consumer; 4) Flexibility: the organization should be able to change to align with emerging trends or deal with unexpected circumstances; 5) Cost: the organization needs to find ways to provide the goods for a profit but remain competitive within the marketplace.
b) For the example of a car-manufacturing firm: 1) Quality means that the cars manufactured and sold to dealers must be free from defects and meet all the specified performance standards; 2) Speed means that when a car dealer makes an order for a particular car for their customer the manufacturer ensures that the car is delivered in the time period promised or for stock cars, in a time period to keep the inventory at sufficient levels; 3) Dependability means that the car manufacturer delivers vehicles to the dealers precisely as agreed. The same applies to delivery of spare parts and car accessories to service centers; 4) Flexibility means that the manufacturer provides a wide variety of options from which their customers can choose. This includes customization options when requested. It also means that the company is able to scale up its operations to meet increased demand; 5) Cost means that the manufacturer has controlled its costs in a way to be able to keep what it charges the dealer in line with what he is able to pass on to the customer, yet still make a profit at the dealership level, too.
Pet Store Questions
1a) Slack, Chambers, & Johnston describe five performance objectives, or factors to be considered, for job design (2007). The first of these is quality, as the ability of employees to provide high quality goods and services is impacted by job design. Certainly providing high quality pet food is important to this business. Extremely high quality can provide real differentiation for a business (Brittin, 2013). The second objective is speed. There are jobs where speed is imperative, such as emergency personnel. Although less important than in medical emergencies, speed is a factor in the pet food business, if just to keep the shelves full and avoid spoilage. Dependability is the next factor. This is very important in the pet supply business, as customers are relying on the store for a basic need for their pets – food. A fourth factor is flexibility. This comes into play in the pet supply business as food choices and customer needs change. Adding new products will require flexibility on the part of the employee. The fifth element of job design is probably the most important in the pet supply industry – cost. Pet supply stores work on very thin margins in a highly competitive environment, thus every possible means of saving cost is key to job design in this industry. Health and safety is important given the hazards within the pet supply retail business, working with heavy, unwieldy stock and many liquids. Finally, the quality of working life is a final consideration. There are many other places for retail workers to find jobs, so to maintain high performing employees the job design should include considerations for the employee’s working life quality.
b) Influences that would help ensure shelf-stacking employees are kept motivated would be found within the behavioral approach to job design, as this kind of approach takes the employee’s motivations into account (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 2007). A first consideration is empowerment. In the context of a shelf-stacker, empowerment may be allowing the employee to have some measure of control, perhaps in the order of what gets shelved or the ability to take breaks anytime within a certain time window. The shelvers could also be presented as a team, whose job is to get everything out on the shelves by a certain time as a group and the team sets up how that is accomplished. Further, the job could have built in flexibility in the job set, so that employees rotate through various jobs such as checker, stacker, back of the store, and front of the store. Also, reducing work hours has been suggested as a way to increase employee satisfaction and increase the chances that the job survives economic changes (Balleer, 2013). The advantage to all of these approaches is that it provides the employee with some control over their job and how it is done. This is also the biggest disadvantage, as if an employee is not motivated, they may take advantage of the control to do slack work and thus lowering the quality of the service and maybe even the goods provided to the customer.
c) The following checks would determine whether the job design process was successful. First and foremost, you would need to be sure that all the performance objectives were being met from the point of view of the customer – quality, sufficient speed, dependability, and cost. This could be seen in growth in the customer base and/or sales. Next, you would check from the point of view of the employee – are the employees staying on the job, do they express having satisfaction in their job? If both these checks are positive, then the job design process has been successful.
2a) A pet food store is a mass service process category. It operates with low variety and high volume. This is the case because in the fact pattern it stated that the store sold mostly food for pets rather than a high variety of products for pets. Another reason why the pet store can be categorized into mass service category is because it has a relatively low degree of customization and interaction but its degree of labor intensity is high. In this particular scenario, labor intensity refers to the ratio of the labor cost to equipment and plant. A pet food store is labor intense because it requires a significantly high content of effort and time with comparatively little equipment and plant cost. Customer interaction refers to the degree or the level to which customers have the power to intervene during the service process but due to the operation layout of this particular service industry, this interaction is quite minimal.
b) A pet food store would be set out in a process operational layout which is sometimes referred to as the functional layout. A process operational layout means that all operations or all the transformation resources that have similar functions are grouped together. The two primary processes in a pet food store are selection of product for purchase by the customers and the check-out/payment process. Thus, the entire product shelving displaying the choices would be grouped together and all the checkout counters would be grouped together. One distinguishable characteristic of this kind of layout is that it is actually very flexible. The grouping together of all the resources or operations in the pet store primary processes makes it flexible such that it can be able to cope with different processing requirements.
c) A disadvantage to the process layout is that it means there are relatively few store employees at the locations where the customers are making their purchase decisions. In a process operation layout, employee roles that even remotely resemble each other are merged at a common point. This may lead to a situation where there is a deficiency of employees at a particular service point, for example at the point where the customers is supposed to make his or her purchase decision. Such an occurrence often leads to a limited interaction between the customer and the people providing the pet food service. This could reduce sales compared to a model where employees would be scattered throughout the area where the customers are deciding what to buy. The reduction of sales could lead to the demise of this particular enterprise. Ina addition to this, another plausible disadvantage that is associated with this process layout is that with the merging of the employee roles, there are bound to be numerous crisscrossing of jobs. This crisscrossing may result in poor visibility when it comes to job flow. When such a thing happens, it becomes hard to trace progress.
3a)
Figure: Auto-Ace Supply Chain
It is required that the Auto-Ace store will acquire most of its items from the main warehouse. However, there are items such as the registration plates and seats that are not stocked in the main warehouse and the Auto-Ace store will have to outsource these items from other warehouses apart from the store’s main warehouse. Customers, being at the tail of the supply chain acquire their selected items from the Auto-Ace store.
b) Vertical integration for a particular function is where a business does the function itself, internally, rather than outsourcing that is, buying the function from another provider (Slack, Chambers, & Johnston, 153-54). A strategic relationship is a kind of outsourcing where the other party is considered a type of business partner rather than merely a provider of services. In strategic relationships the two parties are often linked by a common financial goal and the business partner will get more than just payment for their services but could also have a share in the profit.
The primary merit of vertical integration is control of how all steps of the function is provided. It can also be cheaper depending on the function being done. The primary merit of strategic relationships is ability of each partner to focus on their specialty, the spread of the business risk, and in some cases, a reduced cost due to less need for in-house infrastructure.
c) In the auto supply industry, an option to strategic relationships is outsourcing. This is where various functions within the organization are performed by other entities, but the relationship between the primary company and the outsourcer is merely customer/provider rather than some sort of actual business relationship. Among the considerations for choosing a particular relationship is what kind of discounts (cost) would be available with each relationship, how long is it expected that the relationship would last, and how unique is the service provided by the outsourcer. If the outsourcer is one of the few providers of the needed goods or services, it may make sense to form a strategic relationship rather than go from contract to contract on an outsourcing basis (Wilding, Skipworth, & Rossi, n.d.).
References
Balleer, A. (2013). Can reducing hours save jobs? World Economic Forum. 12 July. Retrieved from
http://forumblog.org/2013/07/can-reducing-working-hours-save-jobs/
Brittin, M. (2013). Don’t aim for business as usual – take a moonshot. World Economic Forum. 20 June. Retrieved from
http://forumblog.org/2013/06/dont-aim-for-business-as-usual-take-a-moonshot/
Slack, N. (n.d.) Operations is not operational . . . Opsman. Retrieved from
http://www.opsman.org/blog/nigel/Operations_is_not_Operational
Slack, N., Chambers, S., & Johnston, R. (2007). Operation management. (5th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ:Prentice Hall/Financial Times.
Wilding, R., Skipworth, H., & Rossi, S. (n.d.) Collaboration in the supply chain. Cranfield School of Management. Retrieved from
http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/p2989/Programmes-and-Executive-Development/Doctorates/The-PhD-Programme/Doctoral-Opportunities/The-Cranfield-Doctorates-Collaboration-in-the-Supply-Chain
