Enhancing Glass Manufacturing Process: A Strategic Initiative

Dominance of three key players in the glass manufacturing industry

Discuss about the Data Analytics for Operations and Supply Chain.

The main initiative towards the corporate strategy of the company should be aimed at the enhancement of glass manufacturing process. The company scoured the world to locate the top producers of plant in the enhancement of the glass manufacturing and standardised the processes with proven American equipment. A significant factor in the decision of the corporate strategy should comprise of the level of expertise that the suppliers included in the glass making process and apply to the extent which the knowledge which has been encapsulated in the design of the equipment. Some of the other strategic initiatives with the hardware suppliers should be considered responsible for ensuring the complete integration of the various aspects of the system. As per the corporate objective, the company should aim at becoming the world class competitor for an innovative approach for enhancing the process technology (Dobrzykowski et al. 2014).

As discussed by Matta et al. (2014), South African political situation is discerned to be highly unstable in nature which may cause various inconveniences for new and existing businesses based on the political agenda. In addition to this, the South African currency is subject to numerous market forces and with low currency and exchange rate (Opresnik and Taisch 2015). The depleting nature of the unemployment has been seen to be another reason for the high entrepreneurship spirit. The unemployment in South Africa has hit by more than 25% of the buying power from the people. The technological factors and advancement in the manufacturing supply chian has seen to be depicted to be considerably thin. The main laws of the country are like that of U.K. This is seen to be particularly the case when exporting goods to South Africa (Wilke, Majumdar and Ochieng 2014).

It has been discerned that the glass manufacturing industry has been able to contribute 0.3% for the total manufacturing and the value of glass sales amounting to R9.317bn in 2015. The industry is seen to be dominated by three main players. The import of the glass products was depicted to be cheaper that the local manufacturers and this was a threat to the local sector. The marketing environment at Consol Glass has been depicted with factors influencing the success of the sector. The five industry players are included with the “dominant three manufacturers as well as Natglass Distributors (Pty) Ltd t/a National Glass, which is a manufacturer and wholesaler of flat” (Hazen et al. 2016).

Impact of the South African political situation on businesses

The main competitors of Consol Glass are PG Group and Nampak. PG Group is seen to own the building of the different types of the programs which are related to building and the automobile glass sector. Some of the other competitor is seen with “Natglass Distributors (Pty) Ltd t/a National Glass” which is identified a flat glass wholesaler. The company needs to be also prioritise the strategies for “Northern Hardware and Glass (Pty) Ltd”, which has been the main manufacturer for “glass products for the building and automotive industries”. As per the present competencies of the company it needs to be seen that the company specializes in “glass packaging products in Africa and Nampak”. In addition to this, the company is determined to manufacture one-third of the glass bottle products in South Africa. The main role of the players has been seen with focusing on the competition commission and enquiring about the allegations on the price fixing and division of market (Pedraza-Martinez and Van Wassenhove 2016).

The company should put an augmented focus on the process technology which is in use of many plants as a competitive weapon. This factor has been conducive in proving the definite cost, quality, lead-time and advantages pertaining to flexibility. These strategies have been further seen to be related to the optimising the CIM to optimise the overall process using the programmed knowledge base. The design of the final system will allow to reduce the manual control and automate overall process. This is further seen to allow the processes to run at an optimum condition on a continuous basis. The operational spin offs have been substantial for the different types of benefits (Li et al. 2016).

The process structures and principles to needs to based on the main ideas relating to hierarchy of command, or definition, evaluating outcomes and provisions for altering organizational structure. The hierarchical command needs to be followed by authority of management and executive teams to create functional line of communication. The role definition should be assigned with giving clear responsibilities for each person within the company which is understood with how individual performance may impact on the overall efficiency of the entire organization. The evaluating outcomes as well as the individual employees’ evaluation need to be determined with the strengths and weaknesses in the overall organizational structure. The weaknesses need to be dealt with staff training, relocation of company assets and eliminating ineffective employees are those duplicating tasks. The principle for altering the organizational structure is depicted with ability to remain dynamic and change itself as per the market environment (Choi, Cheng and Zhao 2016).

Different quality measurement tools

The various types of the dimensions of the quality can be categorised as per “Kaizen / Toyota Production System, Lean Manufacturing / The Toyota Way, Six Sigma and Lean Six” Sigma”. The Kaizen system is seen as the “just-in-time production system pioneered in Japan”. The lean manufacturing way is further depicted with “evolution of Kaizen as a global production system”. The six-sigma process is considered as the improvement model which was introduced in 1996 by Motorola. This model was later “promoted by General Electric’s CEO Jack Welch”. The lean six sigma model has been depicted as another quality measurement tool, in which the organizational models combines the best features for the “Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma”. These models are seen to be important for tracking the continuous improvement on daily basis. The inclusion of the models in a chronological manner has been adopted as per the major components inspired from other models (Guide and Ketokivi 2015).

As discussed by Hübner, Holzapfel and Kuhn (2015), the effect of supply chain in creating effective material flows is depicted with five major flows supply chain. These are seen with “product flow, financial flow, information flow, value flow & risk flow”. The product flows include the movement of goods from the suppliers to the consumers and including the internal and external flows. The inclusion of the financial flows can consider two perspectives of SCM. Firstly, the cost and investment perspective and secondly the flows of funds. The investments and the costs add to moving forward with the supply chain and optimization of “return on the capital employed in a company”. A similar optimisation in the supply chain investment is able to consider product backed down with flow of funds (Alderton 2008).

Table: Control Limit for R-Chart and Xbar Chart

(As created by the author)

The X-Bar control chart has considered samples in the X axis and sample range in the Y axis. In the given process the value of X-Bar as per the four observations has been calculated as 198.2, this shows that the overall value is less than the UCL value of 214.52 and LCL value of 181.88. This depicts that the process is in control as per the X-Bar control chart. However, the sample 3 has almost reached the LCL value which illustrates there is significant scope of improvement to be made in the standardisation of the quality for this medical vacuum pump. The various types of the interpretations made as per the R- Bar control chart has depicted that the process is within the control limit. This is evident with R-Bar value of 22.4 which is seen to be within the UCL value of 51.10 and LCL value of zero (Hitt, Xu and Carnes 2015).

Effective supply chain management

As per the given scenario the company needs charges R34000 per month for the accounting services. The break point in units for this strategy is determined to be 16. This clearly shows that the company neither makes any profit, nor any loss by selling the services to 16 clients. However, considering the revised billing amount of R45000, the accounting firm attains the breakeven point by serving to only 9 customers. Henceforth, on offering the services to additional 7 clients will result in an extra profit for the company which is not present in the present strategy adopted by the company. Therefore, it is recommended for the accounting firm to increase its price from R 34000 to R 45000 without making any changes to the fixed cost and variable cost for customer.

References

Alderton, P. M. (Patrick M. (2008) Port Management and Operations, Igarss 2014. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.

Choi, T. M., Cheng, T. C. E. and Zhao, X. (2016) ‘Multi-Methodological Research in Operations Management’, Production and Operations Management, 25(3), pp. 379–389. doi: 10.1111/poms.12534.

Dobrzykowski, D., Saboori Deilami, V., Hong, P. and Kim, S. C. (2014) ‘A structured analysis of operations and supply chain management research in healthcare (1982-2011)’, International Journal of Production Economics, 147(PART B), pp. 514–530. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2013.04.055.

Guide, V. D. R. and Ketokivi, M. (2015) ‘Notes from the Editors: Restructuring the Journal of Operations Management’, Journal of Operations Management, pp. v–x. doi: 10.1016/S0272-6963(15)00073-X.

Hazen, B. T., Skipper, J. B., Boone, C. A. and Hill, R. R. (2016) ‘Back in business: operations research in support of big data analytics for operations and supply chain management’, Annals of Operations Research, pp. 1–11. doi: 10.1007/s10479-016-2226-0.

Hitt, M. A., Xu, K. and Carnes, C. M. (2015) ‘Resource based theory in operations management research’, Journal of Operations Management, 41, pp. 77–94. doi: 10.1016/j.jom.2015.11.002.

Hübner, A., Holzapfel, A. and Kuhn, H. (2015) ‘Operations management in multi-channel retailing: an exploratory study’, Operations Management Research, 8(3–4), pp. 84–100. doi: 10.1007/s12063-015-0101-9.

Li, F., Nucciarelli, A., Roden, S. and Graham, G. (2016) ‘How smart cities transform operations models: a new research agenda for operations management in the digital economy’, Production Planning & Control, 27(6), pp. 514–528. doi: 10.1080/09537287.2016.1147096.

Matta, A., Chahed, S., Sahin, E. and Dallery, Y. (2014) ‘Modelling home care organisations from an operations management perspective’, Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 26(3), pp. 295–319. doi: 10.1007/s10696-012-9157-0.

Opresnik, D. and Taisch, M. (2015) ‘The conceptualization of sustainability in operations management’, in Procedia CIRP, pp. 532–537. doi: 10.1016/j.procir.2015.01.038.

Pedraza-Martinez, A. J. and Van Wassenhove, L. N. (2016) ‘Empirically grounded research in humanitarian operations management: The way forward’, Journal of Operations Management, pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.jom.2016.06.003.

Wilke, S., Majumdar, A. and Ochieng, W. Y. (2014) ‘Airport surface operations: A holistic framework for operations modeling and risk management’, Safety Science, 63, pp. 18–33. doi: 10.1016/j.ssci.2013.10.015.

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