TESCO

TESCO

Tesco

Introduction

Operations Management participates a key role in achieving the objectives of the major indicators of Tesco. Does the current goal of the operation is to improve customer service and increase profitability, how Tesco uses its resources, would have significant consequences. As a consequence, there have been a number of innovative developments in operations management, which tried to use Tesco resources, is largely a new way to make a big step in changing the performance. Tesco is a successful example of management operations, however, through our investigation but has the disadvantage of operations management must be improved.

Discussion

According to Slack et al. (2004), operations strategy is defined as "the total pattern of decisions which shape the long term capabilities of any type of operation and their contribution to overall strategy". Slack et al. (2004) also states that operations performance objectives relate to the interests of the operation's stakeholders. Applying to Tesco, customer's satisfaction is particularly important to its business. Therefore in order to satisfy its customers and contribute to competitiveness, Tesco's operations performance objectives are mainly reflect on cost, quality, speed, dependability and flexibility five aspects. And they will be analyzed in detail as follows:

With regard to pricing, Tesco every week check over 10,000 prices in Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons stores to guarantee its customers have low prices every day. And it also took steps to reduce cost in order to ensure that the way they work is better, simpler and cheaper. For instance, the reason of Tesco has an effective supply chain is because of implementing an appropriate information technology G.O.L.D. application suite successfully. This software provides Tesco with complete control over warehouse stack. Moreover, the automatic order proposals and warehouse optimization procedures facilitate a fast and flexible business with minimal logistic costs (Kocevar, 2003).Therefore, by doing things cheaply, it will allow Tesco to reduce its price in order to gain higher volumes or increase their profitability on existing volume levels externally. And internally, cost performance is helped by good performance in the other performance objectives.

As Slack et al. (2004) points out that quality is a particular important objective to all operations, as quality is an important aspect of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction and quality operations could both reduce costs and increase dependability. For a grocery retailer, quality could mean goods are in good condition, the store is clean and tidy, decor is appropriate and attractive and staffs are courteous, friendly and helpful etc., so according to our research with Tesco store manager, he stated that Tesco has put more staff into stores and distribution centers in order to improve its availability and service. Moreover, Tesco also launched Clubcard that the information provided by it enables Tesco to better understands their customers.

In addition, Tesco delivered new system of hand-held computers for their staff in all of UK stores, which is to provide key information on the sales floor, simplifying their stock and order operation for customers. And they also have tested self-service checkouts in order to help reduce queuing and ...