Question

Critical Thinking

The scientific community agrees that major outbreaks of communicable diseases, like COVID-19 will be highly likely in the future, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Furthermore, we are also likely to experience additional disruptions to supply chains that result from climate change and political instability.

This outbreak played a serious role in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and also reduced workforces to complete shutdowns, many industries and sectors are suffering due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and manufacturing is taking one of the largest hits.

According to the General Authority for Statistics ,Saudi Arabia’s index for industrial production dropped 3.29 percent in March 2020 when compared to the same month last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The decrease in industrial production resulted mainly from lower production in non-oil manufacturing activities (down by 11.46 percent), as the COVID-19 pandemic led some factories to reduce the production operations late in the month” .

As a Project manager what measures are you going to take for your organization under below mentioned issues:

Critical Question(s)-1: (2.5- Marks)

How will you measure supply chain and production risks and what you could do to mitigate those risks?

Critical Question(s)-2: (2.5- Marks)

Also, when a crisis like rapidly changing prices on consumable items (Ex. face masks).

what steps will you consider to reduce costs, both in the short and medium term?

Critical Question(s)-3: (2.5- Marks)

Discuss the role technology and its importance during Covid time. Also discuss solutions which provided by the organisations.

Critical Question(s)-4: (2.5- Marks)

Discuss the role of Lean manufacturing in the post Covid.

Answer 1

[A] To measure supply chain and production risks few steps are to be followed:

• Prioritise the list of vendors: as by limitizing the work for short duraton can help to survive the pandemic.
• Make a scheduled questionnaire to address specific areas such as quality, alignment, efficiency,etc.
• Make the specific areas under research and fill the questionnaire with the related information required.
• Examins the result got from the assesment.
• Take actions based on the results to be specific and up to date with the assesment.
• Keep updaing assesment with periodical questionaire to be filled time to time.

Apart from this proper supply-chainrisk management framework must be established, monitored time to time and must be reviewed by the company properly. Also by purchasing insurance, evaluationg current risks, checking out of probability of risk, diversifying suppliers, these all measures can help in mitigating the effect of the risk.

[B]

when a crisis like rapidly changing prices on consumable items (Ex. face masks).steps that will be considerd to reduce costs, both in the short and medium term are:

firstly instead of relying on capital intensive completely work can be delegated to cottage and home industries according to the requirement as emergency bulk order can be handled with capital intensive where labors must be reduced to decrease the cost and some work for fulfillment of town to town consumable items that must be handled by cottage industries where maximum labor be employed and as there is no such capital involved as in capital intensive the cost here also is reduced this strategy will help in reducing the cost of machine made products and handmade products which in return thus reduce the price on average basis thus helping in reducing cost with increased employemnt which can be used in both short run and medium term.

[c] Technology played a very crucial role during the era of covid where social distancing is the important tool to fight covid. Few are :

• Learning from distance
• Even in the duration of isolation , online entertainment was big hand to pass the time and keep our mind healthy.
• Helping the covid 19 treatment as it make you aware about the covid affected people and numbers how many are infected.
• Increase the trend of online shopping as without witnessing any contact and steping out of home we can shop anywhere.
• Fitness , health, food receipie, etc apps which became healping hand for every work to be done at home.
• Work from home: a master strock for the one who wants to work but unable to attend the office.
• Clearance of exams: even the exams, treatments, everythng was exchanged over the technology.

Not only this organisations are also managing there work by employing the workers and assigning the work over the technology, using of conference vedio calls meetings were done, discusion over ppt make the projects to be completed.

[D]the role of Lean manufacturing in the post Covid:

From the crisis created by covid 19, it is very imortant to do manufacturing in the bst possible way, i.e., increased efficiency manner and preferences of the customer so that the organisations can come out of the situation of shock created by covid and also in further long run. This can be done by cordinated team, increased efforts and usage of proper technology.

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