Question

Create a fictitious manufacturing or service business and integrate any 25 of the following terms in the description of your business operation. Underline each of these words when typing your response. Your business operation narrative should be accurate, explanatory, and very descriptive. Please be advised that the 400-word requirement is the bare minimum for your assignments.

1. Process

2. Product-service bundling

3. Mass customization

4. Sustainability

5. Efficiency

6. Effectiveness

7. Value

8. External Benchmarking

9. Straddling

10. Order winner

11. Order qualifier

12. Productivity

13. Contract manufacturer

14. Core competency

15. Quality function deployment

16. Value analysis/ value engineering

17. Design for manufacturing and assembly

18. Work breakdown structure

19. Slack time

20. Economies of scope

21. Capacity cushion

22. Capacity

23. Best operating level

24. Capacity utilization rate

25. Learning curve

26. Lead time

27. Work center

28. Lean manufacturing

29. TQM

30. Six Sigma

31. DPMO

32. DMAIC

33. PDCA

34. ISO 9000

35. Conformance quality

36. Quality at the source

37. Dimensions of quality

Answer 1

We are Company X, the pioneers in the commuter motorcycle industry. We are into this business for the past five decades and are known to create value for the consumers through mass customization of our products. The company started out in the late 1960s in this developing country with no direct competitors then. The process was very simple. The company stuck to its core competency of building top-class motorcycles with spare parts procured through outsourcing. We believed quality at the source and relied on the efficiency and effectiveness of our processes for competitive advantage.

It was in the late 1980s when we faced a severe threat from Japanese manufacturers whose products were lighter, swifter, more fuel-efficient, and who offered product service budling, thereby luring more customers. Another issue was that they were able to provide their products at very competitive prices, thanks to their manufacturing excellence.

Our company decided to do external benchmarking to ensure that the productivity and sustainability of the processes are on par with our new competitors. We made the product quality our top concern and went ahead with the implementation of ISO 9000. We studied our capacity utilization rate and implemented process improvement techniques like TQM, Lean manufacturing, and six sigma to reduce waste, improve productivity, and enhance quality. We analyzed and tried to improve the learning curve of our employees, redid the design for manufacturing and assembly, and decided to use continuous improvement tools.

Our efforts bore fruit, and we were able to reduce the waste by 35% during the first three months of the exercise. As a result of the efforts, the customer leads time reduced to 50%, conformance quality improved and capacity utilization rate improved by over 30%. Philosophy of Quality at source brought down the number of reworks and rejection to the lowest in the last three years. This was our first step towards improving efficiency, sustainability, and quality which enabled us to remain competitive in evolving times.