Read and analysed the case study, write an essay discussing the operational issues facing Hawkesbury Cabinets. Please do the proper citation and check for grammar.
The Kitchen cabinet (O’Brien, Sweet, & Sagdic, 2005) is basically the built-in furniture introduced in many kitchens for the purpose of storing cooking instruments, food and so on. A drastic change has been occurred in the recent years. In olden days the people utilized only the freestanding work tables and a small store room for storing all kitchen equipment’s and food stuffs. So day by day the technology gets improved ultimately, thereby the kitchen cabinets came in to existence during 20th century. The Hawkesbury cabinet’s industry targets to provide service to the people of Chinese community in Hawkesbury. They completely focused on personalized kitchens (Awad, 2014). The industrial prominence was grown widely and sales have been increased gradually. Meantime the company finds difficult to serve low contract. The operation management faced difficulty to create low range kitchen cabinets. They even find difficult to maintain the resources in the production industry. The operation manager should prepare themselves with information regarding the business functions and also the necessary components for the manufacture. The current technologies (O’Brien, Sweet, & Sagdic, 2005), functions, the products, business flows have to be pursued by the operation manager. With the help of the knowledge in business flows they can able to enhance the effectiveness of the product, operation productivity. They can able to understand the issues from industrial point of view. It helps to rectify the operational issues by discussing logically with technical parties. The management of the service system leads to important dispute in the world (O’Brien, Sweet, & Sagdic, 2005).
Organizations are subject to more ups and downs in their day to day activities. As a manufacturer today, the accomplishment and increasing the manufacturing quality is not much hard challenge. They can obtain the best manufacturing quality by utilizing the basic method in managing operations. Some of the developed companies going to adapt expensive solutions to implement manufacturing change. They not only encloses the plant floor but also the material flow, quality and warehouse of the entire product supply network and manufacturing process.. Only then manufacturing excellence can be achieved and sustained. As such the work of operations managers in the manufacturing industry (O’Brien, Sweet, & Sagdic, 2005) is becoming more and more challenging in view of the various factors that will be explained further.
The technical advancements in recent methods, materials and recent components have made success on managing operations. The alterations in technical process and products can have an importance for affecting competitiveness, manufacturing systems and manufacture value. The technology can produces many problems by means of increasing the costs, reducing productivity and reducing elasticity unless if they are not associated with the existing system. So to avoid this issues the operation manager need to implement his knowledge in view of new developments that is taking place in manufacturing. The other most important thing is the products become unfashionable with the advancements in technology in due course of time. As a result the operation managers have to regularly keep measures with the recent technologies. Hence the measures will tends to make sure that the organization does not fall behind with the product that is being exclusive. Moreover it is familiar that the operation manager must have the tendency to face and manage with the people requirements, technology and the combination of business needs.
Hawkesbury cabinets have been in business for many years directly serving the services industry. They build our cabinet systems (Beecher, 2001) above the Industrial standard quality and have been exceeding industry standards from the very beginning. They strive every day to improve quality through technology, materials, and manufacturing processes. Hawkesbury cabinets Systems uses the most current and industry leading parametric 3D CAD software to design, inspect, and test all cabinetry design prior to being manufactured. Through this process Hawkesbury cabinets Systems can detect better design intent that is critical to the long and abusive operations they're designed for. This process also set the stage for our industry leading warranty and product support. They have developed the highest quality manufacturing standards and processes for cabinets to meet and exceed these demands. The experts of cabinetry constructs, create, redecorate and restore the banks of traditional cabinets. The cabinet experts also designs furniture to the customer specifications like dining room hutch and corner cabinet for kitchen.
In extension to that there are experts and dealers which particularly concern with kitchen remodeling, designing, closet designing, interior designing, wood working and technical organizing (Beecher, 2001). Thus the experts gather all the critical points of their customers for consideration. So that it helps them to design the cabinet and collect all the materials needed for constructing the cabinet. The Kitchen designers are frequently residing on top of trends in developing industry (Findlay, Webb, & Lund, 2015).
Globalization is increasingly becoming a challenge in the manufacturing industry and in turn for operations managers (Hegab, Zimmerman, & Colwell, 2002). Competing with firms from abroad means an organization has to stay competing by offering good services and good quality products at cheaper prices. The operation manager will certainly be concerned with the services. Thus he must have concentration on four operations like organizing, planning, controlling and leading in order to make sure that the service or product stays competing in the market. Furthermore there will be a demand for the operation manager’s innovativeness (Mamavi & Zerbib, 2014). Thus is the important factor for the business competitiveness in the competing world. In case if the company is going by international level, the operation manager must be in a position to handle the international business. They must enhance their knowledge based on different cultures to bring success to their business.
To overcome the challenges due to globalization, the operation managers need to set a specialized product and target market which will keep the uniqueness of a product or service to be able to compete in the global market. Also, they must have a good understanding of their competitors. Organizations use the concept named total quality management (TQM) to represent their quality efforts. They generally include teamwork for the customer satisfaction based on quality. It is a fact that reduced cost and high quality are key factors that a good or service needs to maintain. The organization must offer the right amount of high quality services to fulfill the needs of the customers and stay competing in the market. They should also offer services at low cost at right time. However, there is a trade-off between cost, quality, quantity and time. It is the responsibility and a challenge for the operating manager to ensure that this trade-off is minimized. The operations manager needs to make sure that either the product or service is to the standard required by the customer. Thus, it is important for the operations manager to maintain their engagement in Total Quality Management (Pazour & Meller, 2012) and the extent to which he is able to meet the standard required by the customer will definitely be a challenge for him. It is crucial for manufacturers to emphasize on improving productivity and hence satisfying customers. Hence, the IT software for enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Pazour & Meller, 2012) is specifically designed for this purpose for empowering the employees.
Finally it is useful to point out the evolutionary terms and shifts have led the need for Operations Management. It can be said that in business organizations the operation function is responsible for producing goods and services. The Operations Manager in the manufacturing industry faces many challenges and these are in the form of: globalization, workforce and social trends, customer satisfaction, economic and environmental issues and technology, as discussed above (Pazour & Meller, 2012). Operations managers in the manufacturing industry are being able to meet new challenges. Firms are able to adapt to changes by adopting new technology and combing machine and human power to improve efficiency. To be successful, the firms are adopting code of ethics and professional standard to improve employee morale and production level. Quality enforcement like TQM and Lean management are used to continuously improve process, people and product (Morgan, 2009). Operation management is putting more emphasis on green initiatives for the industry to remain sustainable. All the strategies discussed above, if well developed and maintained, will overcome the challenges which the operation managers face in the manufacturing industry (Morgan, 2009). This is how the organization will also reach a high competitiveness and it will be able to maintain it.