Guinness UK Limited - Assignment Example

Guinness UK Limited Name Institution Date TASK 1 a) To be able to produce more output, professional managers need to be capable of fulfilling strategic roles in private and government organizations by practicing operations management. In business operations, operations management is very essential particularly in achieving the firm’s objectives since it normally acts like a pillar in an organization by controlling the system of operation. Operations management concerns with design, operation and development of the systems that make and deliver primary products and services of a firm. Similar to marketing and finance, operations management is a business’ functional field with clear management duties. Guinness is a company in United Kingdom that produces alcoholic beverage, that is Guinness, and nonalcoholic beverage, that is Malta Guinness (Lewis & Slack, 2003). In an organization like Guinness, application of operation management is very important in all fabrics of organization’s activities. Guinness uses operations management in ensuring and sustaining efficiency and effectiveness to achieve organization’s objectives. Efficiency in an organization like Guinness concerns with how well resources such as expertise and inputs of humans are utilized irrespective of the purpose for their deployment in an organization. An organization via its activities ensures that its initial objective of maximizing profit and shareholders value is attained (Waters, 2006). To achieve this objective, Guinness has decided to minimize its costs of production by making sure that intangible and tangible resources are not over stretched or wasted in the company. The company therefore has decided to execute its objectives effectively so as to be a market leader in UK and internationally by using little resources in order to attain maximum output. The effectiveness and efficiency measures in Guinness, has resulted into labor productivity, yield, production systems’ efficiency and working capital utilization (Chary, 2009). Guinness is making a good use of managing its products and service via operations management. Managing a product incorporates a broad range of management activities, which range from the moment a new idea for a product is developed to provision of support to customers who are willing to purchase the new product. All organizations usually carry out product management. Guinness usually offers a broad overview of considerations in management and development of the products. The way the product is managed or developed depends a lot on the nature of the company and its products (Loader, 2006). Guinness normally applies its main competences in the fields of branding, manufacturing, marketing via wholesale and retail outlets so as to gain competitive advantage within the market place. b) Several processes of operations management prevail in Guinness Company. In order to produce quality products and achieve the company’s strategic objectives, Guinness ensures that its operation management passes through the following processes. Designing the system which starts with product development is the initial process in operation management. The characteristic and features of the product to be produced is first determined under this process. The facilities and equipments to produce the product is then prepared. How the product is going to be made is also addressed under this process. In Guinness Company, the location, capacity and layout for the production ability is usually determined so as to provide amount of goods as demanded by customers in timely manner. The process therefore normally meets its strategic objective by ensuring that right product is delivered to customers in timely manner. After designing the product, the company then embarks on planning on how it is going to utilize the existing resource base in the system it has designed. This process normally meets its strategic management if the system designed is made to cope with changes in environment. The last process in operation management is system management. Managing the system entails working with individuals to encourage involvement and improvement in organizational performance. For this process to meet its strategic objectives, it is important for an organization to adopt participative and team work management (Gitman & McDaniel, 2008). TASK 2 a) In every company, effective quality management is a very essential aspect of operations management. Guinness Company in United Kingdom is normally critical about the products it develops for its customers in the market place. Effective quality management is very crucial in effective operations management, particularly when improving the products constantly so as to meet taste and preferences of all customers at all times (Daft, 2007). Of late, developments in quality, such as outsourcing, total quality management, benchmarking and reengineering have brought about advancements in operations management in Guinness Company. The company via its benchmarking and reengineering activities has often earned the leadership within the market. Benchmarking normally serves as a first class internal auditing process that the company applies to diagnose its disadvantages and identify the ways of changing the weaknesses into strength so as to enhance the customer base of the company within the market place (Griffin, 2007). Effective quality management makes it possible for Guinness Company to adopt several management principles that can be employed to achieve the company’s objectives. Through effective quality management, organizations are able to understand their customers better. This enables organization to attain its objectives by understanding the future and current customers’ requirements, meeting and exceeding customers’ expectation. Effective quality management strengthens the company’s leadership. Organization, through its leadership, establishes unity of purpose and direction. Effective quality management enables leaders to create and sustain organization’s internal environment thus enabling individuals to fully participate in attaining the objectives of the company. Involvement of individuals at every level in an organization allows the abilities of the individuals to be utilized to benefit an organization (Pride & Hughes, 2009). b) Pride & Hughes (2009) argues that Project quality management is normally about synergy of constant development of the project and project delivery’s principal. Application of effective quality management greatly ensures that the organization attains the requirements of customers. Several processes of effective quality management exist in Guinness Company. The processes therefore entail quality planning, perform quality assurance and perform quality control. In order to attain the organization strategic management objectives, quality planning identifies standards that are important to the company and how the standards are attained. This is usually an important process of the planning process group. Quality planning is a systematic process that transforms quality policy into objectives and needs that are measurable and outlines steps that are sequential in a given time frame. The strategic management objectives can also be attained by Guinness through undertaking performance quality assurance. Performing quality assurance refers to carrying out of the quality activities when doing business duties. Quality assurance in Guinness Company entails regulation of the raw materials quality, quality of assemblies, quality of products and components, services that relates to management and production and processes of inspection and production. The last process in effective quality management is performance of quality control. Performance of quality control refers to monitoring deliverables so as to asses whether they conform to quality standards of the company and identifying how causes of unsatisfactory performance can be removed permanently. This process normally occurs in Guinness Company as part of monitoring and managing process group. It is usually done in Guinness Company through reviewing the quality of every factors of production that are involved in production. In Guinness Company, quality control emphasizes on three aspects, which incorporates elements such as job management, processes that are well defined and managed and controls, competence such as skills, qualifications, knowledge and experience, and soft elements such as integrity of a person, confidence, quality relationships, team spirit, motivation and culture of the company. TASK 3 a) Strategic quality planning is a systematic process that defines the long-term goals of the organization in relation to quality and customers. It normally integrates goals, quality and customers into a cohesive business plan. Strategic quality planning can enable an organization to carry out organizational breakthroughs so as to attain a competitive advantage and good leadership. The performance of an organization can be improved by changing the existing strategic quality plan. In order to create a strategic quality change plan, organization’s leaders need to involve in the process personally. They also need to do away with the atmosphere of blame and make decisions on the best data that prevail. Customer focus also needs to be included in the process of deploying strategic quality plan. In order to change the quality plan for Guinness Company, several elements need to be considered, which include vision, mission, values and policy (Hitt & Hoskisson, 2009). Changing the strategic quality plan for Guinness Company starts by changing the vision to be customer-focused. The vision need to be changed so that it defines the expected benefits. The vision need to be changed so that it has a compelling and sharing aspect within the company. The company should ensure that it performs what the vision states since the vision statements only remind what the organization is undertaking. When changing the company’s vision, it is essential not to concentrate only on shareholders, but rather to focus on every stakeholder. The vision also should not be too easy or hard to attain. The mission of Guinness Company should be changed so that it clarifies well the purpose of the company. The mission should be planned in a way that it provides an agreed-upon direction that can be utilized as a basis for decision-making. In order to change the vision into an attainable plan, it is important to break it down into main strategies. The duties of the strategies can then be distributed to key executives. Five areas therefore need to be evaluated so as to determine if the changed strategies are going to improve the performance of the company. These areas includes loyalty and satisfaction of customers, costs associated with poor products’ or processes’ quality, culture of the organization, processes in the business and competitive benchmarking. If each of these areas are well analyzed, the strategies formulated can be easily determined if they are going to improve business performance. b) According to Hitt & Hoskisson (2009), several tools, systems and resources can be used to support business processes intended to be entailed in quality change process. Goals-based planning and organic strategic planning are some of the systems to be used in supporting business processes. Goals-based planning normally begins with focus on the mission, values and vision of the company. It focuses a lot on the goals to achieve the mission, strategies to attain the goals and planning action, that is, who is going to do what and at what time. Organic strategic planning begins by articulating the vision and values of the organization, and then actions plan so as to attain the vision while sticking to the values. Appreciative inquiry can also work in supporting business processes. As a resource to support business processes, planning team is very important in strategic quality change process (Hitt & Hoskisson, 2009). Chief executives and chair of the board should be included to support business processes. The best tool to be used to support business processes is quality. The quality change process should be carried out with the aim of attaining the best from the plan. This can greatly support the business processes since it has already given the processes direction. c) The implication of planned strategic quality change is to improve the performance of the business through provision of quality products, maximizing profits and having an environment that is conducive for all its workers. In the organization, the strategic quality change is supposed to ensure that the organization is managed towards the right direction and that workers are effectively undertaking their duties. Strategies formulated need to be realistic and measurable so as to attain the required quality (Wylie, 2009). This increases the amount of the products produced and sold thus increasing the profit of the company. The planned strategic quality change however has some external implications. Through planned strategic quality change a company can have a competitive advantage over other competing companies in the market since the strategy enables the company to produce quality product at lesser cost. The quality change also implies that the company is after building its reputation so as to have a big share of the market. d) Designing systems that monitors the implementation of planned strategic quality change can start with obtaining the general agreement within the organization by communicating with employees, directors, managers and other stakeholders. The systems should focus a lot on developing the organization. They need to identify the goals of planned strategic quality change. The systems should be structured in such a way that they outline clearly how and when the project needs to be started and accomplished. They also need to identify the resource to be used in the implementation process and how training for the project is supposed to be conducted. The systems should clearly outline how planned strategic quality change can be implemented as a team (Murphy & Willmott, 2010). TASK 4 a) Murphy & Willmott (2010) argues that Execution and monitoring for strategic quality change in Guinness Company can be done by first analyzing the company’s environment that is, critically analyzing strategic goals, strategic objectives, vision and mission of the company. The analysis entails defining the mission of the work team that is, clearly stating the purpose of the team work, developing an effective vision for the work team, setting goals for the team, establishing measurable objectives, determining the deliverables to produce for all the objectives, determining the person to carry out every action and by when, consolidating the performance plan of the individual team members and finally designing individual development plans. The mission of the work team needs to provide sufficient reason for the existence of the team. It should also be linked with the mission of the company. The vision of the work team should develop enough stretch so as to attain excellence. The work team’s vision should also be in line with the vision of the company. Team work’s goals need to be set in such away that they are linked with the goals of the organization. The attainment of work team objectives should results into attainment of company’s objectives. The outlined actions should ensure that all the deliverables are produced at the required quality standard. Allocation of work to every individual ensures that workload is fairly distributed. Personal development plans should be designed in such away that they develop plans that ensures current excellent performance. They also need to ensure that the company has the necessary competencies to attain its vision (Cohen & Eimicke, 2008). b) The best way to introduce quality culture in Guinness Company is through adaptation of mechanism that ensures quality culture prevail at workplace. Quality culture therefore, can be introduced in Guinness Company by establishing a quality management system that is based on ISO9000. ISO9000 is a set of standards for quality assurance and quality management systems established by international standard organization. The standard gives a framework for quality system development in every organization. It is purely a system of management that assist in running the business in a more organized and systematic way that results into delivering of consistent quality products and services to customers. Guinness Company needs to ensure that its external and internal customers are satisfied with the products they produce. The processes of the company should also be improved so as to ensure that the products produced are of improved quality. Effective communication within the organization is also very important in ensuring the prevalence of quality culture (Evans, 2005). TASK 5 a) Several improvements are expected to be achieved through implementation of strategic quality change. The company expects to be closer to its customers than ever before by providing products that satisfies customers’ requirements. Implementation of strategic quality change enables the company to improve its processes of production. The company, in order to improve on the quality of the products produced, it embarks in adopting the processes of production that produces quality products and at less costs. Improved processes of production therefore not only result into high quality product but also ensure that sales and profits are maximized. Implementation of strategic quality change therefore designs, manages and improves systems that produce the company’s products (McCollum, 2004). The performance of the company is expected to improve through implementation of strategic quality change. The company is expected to acquire a huge amount of the market share. Strategic quality change enables the company to dominate the market through provision of unique and high quality products. Implementation of the change is also expected to improve resource procurement. Resources such as time, effort and integrity can be effectively utilized within the organization. Products, through fair application of human resources, are expected to be produced on timely basis (Mukherjee, 2006). The way the products are distributed to consumers is expected to improve through implementation of strategic quality change. Implementation of strategic quality change enables the company to have standardized ways of distributing commodities to consumers. Strategic quality change can result into formulation of modern retail outlets that effectively distribute the products to users. The products produced by Guinness Company are also expected to improve. Guinness is expected, through implementation of strategic quality change, to produce products of desired tastes and that are not harmful for human consumption. The implementation of the change is also expected to improve the competitive advantage of Guinness Company in United Kingdom. b) In order to achieve the objectives of Guinness Company, it is important to further improve the strategic quality management. The strategic quality management needs to seriously focus on customers. Customers are normally the judges of quality. Guinness Company needs to further improve on its understanding of the needs of customers, understand the current and future customers and move at a speed of changing markets that requires effective strategies for listening and learning from customers. The company should also be able to measure the satisfaction of customers relative to its competitors and build a strong relationship with customers. Customers’ requirement, particularly differences between key customers groups, should be related closely to strategic planning, product design, workforce training activities and process development of the company. Further improvement can also be made through gathering satisfaction and dissatisfaction information from customers. This kind of information is very essential since by understanding them, right improvements in the quality of the products can be made. The improvements can result into creation of satisfied customers who benefit the company with loyalty, positive referrals and repeat business. Creation of satisfied customers incorporates effective and prompt response and solutions to their requirements and desires, plus creating and maintaining positive relationships (Griffin, 2006). References Lewis M. & Slack N. (2003). Operations Management: Critical Perspectives on Business and Management. London: Routledge. Waters D. (2006). Operations strategy. New York: Cengage Learning EMEA. Chary J. (2009). Production and operations management. London: Tata McGraw-Hill Education. Gitman L. & McDaniel C. (2008).The Future of Business: The Essentials. New York: Cengage Learning. Murphy D. & Willmott H. (2010). Organization theory and design. New York: Cengage Learning EMEA. Loader D. (2006). Fundamentals of global operations management. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Griffin W. (2007). Fundamentals of Management. New York: Cengage Learning. 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