OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations Management Case Studies on Benchmarking and Inventory Management

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Benchmarking in the National Health Service2

About National Health Service2

The need for benchmarking4

Problems faced by NHS Trust5

Benefits accrued from benchmarking6

Suggestions for improvement7

Case study on Ford Motor Company8

About Ford Motor Company8

Lean manufacturing challenge faced by Ford9

Benefits of deploying Inbound Planning Engine12

Suggestions for improvement13

Conclusion14

References16

Appendix18

Operations Management Case Studies on Benchmarking and Inventory Management

Introduction

Operations management relates to the design and management of services, supply chains and products, and their supply (Shim 1995, p. 289). The focus of operations management is to make efficient delivery of goods and services to clients possible through development, acquisition and utilizations of various resources. Operations management takes place at all levels in the organization. For instance, it can take place at the tactical, operations and even strategic level. Many companies around the globe are focussing on employing operations management as a tool to provide their valued customers with better products and services, so that they can get their customer lifetime value.

There are several issues related to the field of operations management. Operations management is an attempt to improve plant management and its layout, better control of production scheduling, rapid inventory management, expedition of production processes and better equipment maintenance (Carpinetti 2003, p. 542). On a broad scale, we can say that the goal of operations management is to achieve effectiveness and efficiency of different operations of the organization (Shim 1999, p. 305). On a very broad scale, there are five purposes of operations management. These are flexibility, speed, quality, cost management and dependability.

The paper is based on two case studies. One is the case study of benchmarking as used in National Health Service. The other case study is on inventory and freight management at Ford Motors. The paper summarises the two case studies. It discusses the problems that were being faced by the two organizations before they implemented the operations management technique, as well as details about how the technique was implemented in the organization, and what benefits were accrued from the implementation. There are various step involved in the implementation of the operations management techniques that are discussed hereunder. Moreover, the paper makes suggestions about how the company can make full use of deploying the operations management technique. It also gives a conclusion to the paper where it discusses the merits of employing an effective operations management tool tailored to the needs of the two companies.

Benchmarking in the National Health Service

The case gives the example of benchmarking at National Health Service and proves how significant organizational improvement can take place with dedication to improving performance. The case study is one of the series in the study of benchmarking best practices in the UK. Benchmarking is a complex tool for performance improvement. It is not something that can be done automatically (Goltz 2004, p. 6). The people who implement this are as important as the decision to benchmark. Moreover, it is extremely important to consider the context in which the change is applied in the ...