Complexity and Operations Performance: A Case Study
| العنوان: | Complexity and Operations Performance: A Case Study |
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| المؤلفون: | Mateus L. Simonb, Valerio A. P. Salomon, Jorge Muniz Juniora |
| المصدر: | Annals of Management Science. 5:93-103 |
| بيانات النشر: | International Center for Business & Management Excellence (ICBME), 2016. |
| سنة النشر: | 2016 |
| مصطلحات موضوعية: | Flexibility (engineering), Engineering, Operations research, business.industry, Applied Mathematics, media_common.quotation_subject, Mass customization, Automotive industry, Competitor analysis, Competitive advantage, Product (business), Production (economics), Quality (business), business, media_common |
| الوصف: | (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. IntroductionOne of the popular competitive strategies used by automakers is to increase their product portfolio. They must have seen that this strategy works well despite the fact that more variety of products causes escalating costs and complexity in the manufacturing systems (Alford, Sackett, & Nelder, 2000). Producing high variety products within greater production volumes is a strategy known as mass customization (MC). Managing MC environments involves managing many production or operational complexities and balancing of workforce (Zhu, Hu, Koren, & Marin, 2008), planning and managing logistics (Wilding, 1998), and developing and operationalizing product structure architecture (Vickery, Koufteros, Droge, & Calantone, 2016), to name a few.Sometimes, there are cause-effect relations among product variety, production flexibility and operational complexity (Hu, et al., 2011). That is, product variety may require production flexibility, which results in operational complexity (Fisher & Ittner, 1999). With higher product variety, MC offers competitive advantages, if effectively managed. However, if not well-managed, MC may lead to many problems such as increase in production cost, decrease in product quality and delayed delivery (Gotzfried, 2012).The purpose of this work is to analyze the relationship between production complexity and operational performance in an MC production environment, typical in automobile industry of commercial vehicles, such as trucks and buses. From the review of Operations Management (OM) literature, we identified some research opportunities. The relate to the definition of multiple strategies for assembly lines (Da Silva, Tubino, & Seibel, 2015); and designing assembly systems more efficient to shorten time-to-market (Rekiek, De Lit, & Delchambre, 2002).Product variety may have impact on all the functions of a company, including operations, finance, marketing, design, and human resources functions and more. Nevertheless, this study will focus on operational performance in the areas of production and logistics. Specially, our focus is on the production of truck cabins by a Brazilian plant of a transnational company. This plant operates in an MC environment. Information Entropy (Frizelle & Suhov, 2008) is the main complexity measure in this study. In workstations with manual operations, combinations of assembly do influence operational performance, causing assembly errors and delivery delays.Section 2 of the research presents literature review on mass customization and conceptualizes information entropy. Section 3 presents the research methodology. Section 4 presents the research case. Section 5 presents the information entropy calculation and analyses the relationship between operation complexity and operation performance. Summaries, conclusions and recommendations from the research are presented in Section 6.2. Literature Review2.1. Mass CustomizationProduct variety does stimulate sales and does satisfy some specific requirements from customers, and this creates the need for MC (Xia & Rajagopalan, 2009). By offering customized products, companies may reduce competitive pressures in that this make direct comparisons of their products with the products of their competitors impossible or difficult to make and thereby avoiding price wars (Lancaster, 1990). MC environment allows higher returns for suppliers because customers are usually willing to pay more for products that perfectly meet their requirements (Ulrich, 2011). The heterogeneity of products in MC also enhances operational performance. If demand for a product drops, the plant can continue operating by replacing the production of the product with the production of another product. In this way, MC production plants are much more capable of absorbing the negative effect of market fluctuations than plants with smaller mix of products (Fisher & Ittner, 1999). … |
| تدمد: | 2161-5004 2161-5012 |
| الوصول الحر: | https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_________::983829b0faf6a17f71787055a5f94a60Test https://doi.org/10.24048/ams5.no1.2016-93Test |
| رقم الانضمام: | edsair.doi...........983829b0faf6a17f71787055a5f94a60 |
| قاعدة البيانات: | OpenAIRE |
| تدمد: | 21615004 21615012 |
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