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Nissan S Operations Management Essay

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Operations management
1. One of the improvement initiatives that helped to win the Sunderland plant a new model was a four-year programme. It started eight years before the new model was due to start production. Why do you think it takes eight years for initiatives like this to come to fruition?

Definition
Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services to its users. A great deal of focus is on efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Therefore, operations management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes, for example, retail, manufacturing, & whole sale.etc.
Background
One may generally consider that there are three distinct …show more content…

Nissan Sunderland plant has achieved spectacular results in productivity and efficiency, and therefore has developed a very strong reputation which does not happen overnight.
There are numerous business improvement initiatives that can be used by organisations to continually improve quality, productivity and sustainability towards achieving excellence. The initiatives can be approaches, systems, tools and/or techniques such as TQM, JIT, Lean Kaizen. Many organisations try to implement these initiatives to try and cure all organisation problems. In reality, however, none of the individual initiatives can solve all problems effectively in the organisation. Each initiative has a role to play towards achieving business excellence.
Managing change among employees
Some initiatives are more affective under certain situations (Ricondo & Viles, 2005). However attempting to apply any initiative in isolation will only provide short term benefits (Dale & McOutor 1998, Dale 2007, icondo & Viles 2005). It is also believed that the attitude of people is key to business improvement initiatives. This determines how long an organisation or operation will take to change and adapt to new initiatives. If companies are to improve their business performance and productivity, they need to look very closely at the attitude of their employees.
Employee Training
There is poor attitude existing among the workforce then any

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