Four D's Of Operations Analysis

Introduction

Operations management refers to the administration of business practices to create the highest level of efficiency possible within an organization . It involves the conversion of materials and labour into goods and services in the most efficient way possible to maximise the profit of a firm . Operations is one of the major functions of an organisation and it requires the management of strategy and day-to-day production.

There is an entire range of decisions that determine the purpose and structure of managing an operation . Effective management of such a dynamic process falls within a set of interconnected processes, called the Four D’s of operations management. The Four D’s are design, deliver, develop and direct . Fig. 14

Before the market was opened, tasks were delegated among team members with one member in charge of one process in the production line. The first order that was taken turned out to be quite difficult as it had a lead time of 15 minutes, and a few bottlenecks were discovered. The first bottleneck occurred while folding paper into A7 size. Second bottleneck occurred in the stencilling process. The first order was a failure because by the time we had stencilled the first card, time was already up. After this initial failure, the team made a few decisions. First, to eliminate the bottleneck encountered in the first stencilling process we decided to have two people stencilling at the same time. We then placed orders for additional stencils and pens. The second decision we made was to stop taking orders requiring A7 paper as we felt the difficulty in making the folds was slowing our production process down. We would only focus on orders that required A5 and A6 paper. To minimise costs, we agreed to make few orders as possible, and to only take orders for which we have the correct paper

We had a good foundation because we made decisions concerning our processes early in the game. Mistakes made when working on the first order were crucial to us improving and coming up with our long-term strategy. We kept the team agile by having some members complete more than one task. The only team members with specialised jobs were our writer because she had the best handwriting in the group, and the team member tasked with keeping an eye out on the market. By having a flexible team we were able to reduce bottlenecks efficiently and completed most of our orders in less than 15 minutes regardless of lead