Page 590 - Introduction to Business

564 PART 6 Managing Business Operations, Management Information Systems, and the Digital Enterprise

control decisions Decisions made once Control decisions are the decisions made once the production system is pro-
the production system is producing ducing. For example,
• What should be the production sequence of different work orders at different
workstations?
• How should product quality be controlled?
Design decisions have long-term implications and are typically made using a
time horizon of years. Planning decisions have medium-term implications and are
typically made using a time horizon of months. Controlling decisions have short-
term implications and are typically made using a time horizon of weeks.

reality In two business organizations that you know well, identify the opera-
CH ECK tions manager. Examples of business organizations that you may know
well are your local bank, car dealership, or supermarket.

Design Decisions

LEARNING OBJECTIVE 6
Identify the design decisions about product, process, capacity, location, and layout.
Given the long-term implications of design decisions, operations managers need to
exercise extreme care when making them. For example, changing the location of
one of the manufacturing plants of DaimlerChrysler could be an expensive propo-
sition. Similarly, changing the layout of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center is not a
trivial task.

Product
From a business perspective, successful product designs can only be achieved with
the full cooperation of all the business functions involved. Lack of cooperation can
lead to undesirable consequences, such as products that are useful for customers
but too expensive to produce or products that incorporate the latest technology but
are too difficult for customers to use.
From an operations management perspective, there are several issues, tools,
and concepts that need to be considered when designing products. We will first
look at designing goods.

Design for Manufacturing. Products should be designed with the firm’s
manufacturing capabilities in mind. A great engineering design is useless if the
company cannot produce the product.

Design for Assembly. A good product design should not only consider how
the product will be manufactured, but also how the product will be assembled. The
main focus of this effort is to reduce the number and complexity of the parts that
make up the product, as well as to simplify the assembly steps and methods.

Design for Recycling. Because of environmental concerns, a good product
design should also take into account the possibility of disassembling the product
for recycling of materials and components. In fact, an emerging idea in manufac-
remanufactured products New products turing is to remanufacture products, where components of old products are
in which the components of old
products are being reused removed and used in new products. Examples of products with remanufactured
components are automobiles, computers, and telephones.

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