Operations Management Business Plan

Commissioned with the tasks of managing the operations for Menard’s, I am facing various challenges that currently hinder the company’s plans of making profits and retaining employees. After a close analysis of the working environment and operation management at Menard’s, I have identified stringent problems that require immediate treatment. The main problem that stays in the way of Menard’s increasing its profits is the chaotic operations and the mismanaged resources. Improper rotation of materials, poor management for unloading and reloading operations and coordinating the shipping to Midwest generate various costly mistakes for the company. The root of the poor operations management stays in the human resource management system. Employees are not motivated and are not correspondingly trained for performing their jobs, which create a high employee turnover and uncontrolled workers, which describes the nature of operations’ deficiencies.
For turning around operations and increasing the company’s profits, while retaining employees, as the new Assistant Logistics Manager for Menard’s, I have to prepare a strategy for dealing with the identified problems, finding solutions to address these problems.
The first aspect that I would like to address is people. The fact that they are not motivated and properly trained for the jobs that they perform explains the mistakes registered on Menard’s operations site, while the chaotic operations are explained by the lack of coordination and executive authority. My plan to address this situation involves setting up an organizational change, based on implementing a mix of authoritative and transformational leadership approach. Working in the manufacturing and dealing with loading, reloading, shipping and delivering raw materials implies routine activities, which require a high degree of control for assuring the correct execution of activities on different levels. At this point, my plan is to engage and delegate five employees, having the roles of team coordinators (or team leaders). They will be responsible of controlling the quality of the employees’ work, of motivating their co-workers and of reporting, where necessary, the draw-backs. Therefore, this plan requires both an authoritative and a transformational leadership approach. Authoritative approach is required for monitoring, evaluating, controlling and applying executive commands for the correct fulfillment of tasks, whereas the transformational leadership approach is meant to motivate, inspire and influence workers to provide the best work quality.
The five designated team leaders will be also responsible with implementing and delivering an operations’ architecture within Menard’s manufacturing, focused on reloading, unloading, shipping and housekeeping activities. The operations architecture strategy will cover all areas of activities unfolded within Menard’s site, establishing a connection between various activities developed on-site, responsible teams for the execution of each activity and the expected outcomes for each activity. A reward and punishment Human Resource strategy should be applied at this point for the teams that succeed in accomplishing the set outcomes and for those who fail to succeed. However, both the reward and punishment strategies should be designed for targeting the employee retention. As such, while the rewards will be based on increased benefits and monetary recognition for employees (project-based), the punishments will refer to inserting the teams that failed to meet the expected results into an intense training program. The training program will consist of a brainstorming section (wherein the workers will evaluate their own work identifying what went wrong and what they need to improve) and a workshop section, in which they will learn how to improve their work.
Regarding training programs, all workers should constantly participate to training programs and should take tests, meant to assess their knowledge level and work preparedness for dealing with the assigned tasks. Coordinated and motivated by the five on-site team leaders assigned to supervise the workers and inspire them to achieve improved individual and team results, the employees will work on established guidelines. Moreover, the fact that their activities will be organized will conduct to a decreased chaos and to the minimization of the on-site errors.
Having well organized teams, knowing their responsibilities will decrease the dead time, set a clear direction of the traffic for the unloading, reloading and shipping operations, which will increase the trailer turnaround times, improving the efficiency. Improved efficiency means handling more operations, hence, increased performances. Having increased performances will translate in more compensation for the workers, therefore, more motivated employees, who will dedicate their energy to improving the quality of the operations, under the firm guidance of their team leaders.
While focusing on optimizing the operations, decreasing the time dedicated for each activity for gaining increased productivity and eliminating the manufacture’s site errors, one significant focus will be the housekeeping. This aspect has an environmental focus, but it is also meant to contribute to increased efficiency by liberating the working space by discarding the debris, tarps and spacers. Housekeeping also contributes to savings, because the discarded materials can be disassembled, recycled and reused in other processes. Therefore, the housekeeping process will consist in creating an in-house sector dedicated to recycling and disassembling of materials. The materials that cannot be reused will be separately collected and delivered to landfills.
Having an organized production site, Menard’s will be able to send dated materials and customer special orders with the highest priority, relying on the proficiency of the company’s subordinates and the revised operating system, plus the organized production flux, which values time efficiency and qualitative work.