Operations management principles and applications

¶ … JIT Companies

There are a number of instances where JIT manufacturing procedures would be totally inappropriate. For most companies in various types of service industry, JIT practices would seem inappropriate. This goes into play even more when considering the specialty foods service industry. JIT manufacturing depends on extreme consistency from suppliers; "even more taxing, suppliers have to deliver materials of uniformly high quality," where the demand is always asking for a uniform delivery of the same types of supplies (Hutchins & Slovak, 1986). In specialty food restaurants on service companies, which have been gaining popularity with an evolution in consumer trend demanding more local meats and products, companies get whatever their suppliers have on hand. The local butcher or fisherman simply brings in what they have for that day. There is no consistency and thus the principles of JIT would not work at all. Also, companies that utilize MRP II practices may want to avoid JIT manufacturing styles as well because it may "prevent manufacturing managers from using the tools they need to run their operations" (Karmarkar, 1989). MRP II is much more of a computer-based system, whereas JIT manufacturing relies more so on human-driven push systems. As such, JIT may interfere with the set up already put into place by the use of MRP II systems, making it inappropriate to use in such situations. One such company that has used MRP II for an extended period of time is Coca Cola. They always have a high demand, and thus MRP systems work better because it automates elements of inventory. They already have a steady pull system and thus do not need to try to estimate their weekly and monthly production in order to save in unused inventory because they have such a strong and steady demand for the product. They should not utilize JIT because there are relatively little fluctuations in supply and demand, and JIT would only confuse the already established and successful MRP II system already in place.

Question 2

There are different scheduling procedure needs for various types of service operations, such as restaurants, hospitals, and airlines. The type of scheduling procedure depends on the nature of business operations and the overall organizational goals. There is first resource constrained scheduling procedures, which works in situations with much more exact specifications (Xu et al., 2010). This type of scheduling procedure works for smaller projects, where there are fewer assumptions to be made in the process of business operations. Airline services would benefit from the strict assumptions that revolve around the quality of service provided and the subsequent customer satisfaction related to that quality. All customers have relatively similar requirements, they want tog et to their destination as fast and as pleasantly as possible. Additionally, this would work for hotel companies because the need to fulfill similar consumer demands works best with resource constrained scheduling procedures. Yet, in the restaurant industry, customer priorities are much more complicated. Essentially, each customer may have their own unique and individual requirements for the company in question. This takes a greater amount of time to meet the demand and also has a lot more elements that are not as strict in their general assumptions. As such, priority constrained scheduling procedures would work better within a restaurant. Priority constrained scheduling procedure places scheduling procedures more on priority than on actual resources (Chong, 2009). This would demand some staff work over or less than what they would traditionally expect.