CAPACITY PLANNING

Capacity Planning



Capacity Planning

Part A

Company should be concerned to satisfy its customers' requirements for fast and dependable services at reasonable price, as well as helping its own suppliers to improve services they offer. There are five basic performance objectives and they apply to all types of operation:

Quality

Speed

Dependability

Flexibility

Cost (Slack, N. et al, 2001).

These operations performance objectives are analysed here in accordance to TMC.

Doing things right by providing error free goods and services, which will satisfy the customers, is known as 'quality'.

According to the case study, Toyota's vehicles consistently rank near the top in third-party customer-satisfaction surveys. Being voted by many market research and surveys as the car of the year for several years it shows that, Toyota has a successful record worldwide. Because of the good quality Toyota's success kept going, where in 1995, Toyota was the best car in the Middle East. Also, TMC has produce a good quality cars that are quit and do not emit unpleasant fumes, such as more than 40 emission-control systems and dozens of technologies that have improved passenger-car safety (Ahmed, A., 2003, Coursework).

An other performance objective is speed, which means by doing things fast, to minimise the time between the order and the availability of the product or service that gives the customer e speed advantage.

The TMC's techniques are focussed operations that reduce complexity by using simple and small machines, which are robust and flexible. By rearranging layout and flow to enhance simplicity improves speed of production. On the coursework, statistics show that in the late 1980s, the output per worker was as much as two or three times higher than US or European plants.

Third performance objective is dependability that means doing things in time for customers to receive their gods or services when they are promised.

TMC includes 'Just-in-time' (JIT) production system with multi skilled worker that work as a team, and with 'kanban control' has allowed them to deliver products as promised. Improving efficiency and quality is a concern not only of managers and technical experts but also of all employees. So, by doing this, TMC gives a dependability advantage to its customers.

A clear result of responding to a dynamic environment is that organisation change their products and services and changes the way they do business. This performance objective is known as 'flexibility'.

(Peters, T., 1998) argues that we must learn to love change and develop flexible and responsive organizations to cope with the dynamic business environment.

In the TMC plant it means the ability to adopt its manufacturing resources so that it can launch new models. The coursework analyses that, Toyota was able to achieve high level of flexibility, producing relatively small batches of different models with little or no loss of productivity or quality. TMC during the years has provided a range of options that customers are able to choose.

Part B

One major operations objective, especially where companies compete with prices is 'cost'. Low price is a universal attractive objective to customers, which can be achieved by producing ...