Factors Affecting Facility Design, Deming’s PDCA Cycle, Service Customers, Capacity Management Strategies, Queue Configurations, Inventory Management, And Service Outsourcing

Factors That Can Influence Facility Design

List and describe the factors that can influence facility design. Give an example of each if you were considering opening up a new golf course.

List and describe the 4 steps in Deming’s PDCA cycle. Give an example of what you would do in each step as if you were a restaurant owner and had noticed an increasing amount of customer complaints about the quality of food they were being served.

List and describe the 4 different types of service customers. How you would attract each type if you owned a local tavern. Which type(s) do you think you would be most associated with and why?

Compare and contrast the two generic strategies for capacity management. Describe three ways you could accomplish each. Which strategy would you use if you owned a grocery store and why?

Compare and contrast the different types of Queue configurations. Give advantages and disadvantages of each type if you were in charge of an optometrist shop. Which one would you use and why?

Discuss the implications of service outsourcing for employees, stockholders, customers, and host-country economy when a firm outsources a call center overseas. Which would you be most concerned with and why?

List and describe the different roles of inventory in services. Give an example of each as it would pertain to a sporting goods store. Which be most important to you and why?

Discuss how information technology can help to create a competitive advantage through inventory management. Give an example of how you could use information technology for your inventory management if you were an auto body repair shop.

The following are the factors that can influence the facility design are as follows:

Use of Product: The choice of the material is required to take into account to identify what the products are used in. A new golf course requires a series of holes, teeing ground, fairway and a green with flagstick.

Interior Layout: The surface materials, as well as furnishings, are used for the interior design of the golf course (Johanson & Mattsson 2015).  The interior layout of the golf course is developed along with a regional and individualized theme that is specific to the area. Various types of accent color schemes that are utilized to distinguish various functional areas.

Driving Range: A golf course includes among the facilities with a driving range with carry out greens, bunkers as well as driving regions. Driving ranges are the facilities, which uncommitted to the golf course, where the players just hit balls into the range for perform.

Steps in Deming’s PDCA Cycle

Carpet: The carpets and other finish materials comply with the acceptance criteria within the Interior Design Policy. The facility of the golf facility has spike proof carpeting.

Plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle uses four-step management method that is used to manage as well as improve processes as well as products. The following are the four steps such as:

Plan: The owner of the restaurant identifies that their food restaurant delivers food 2 hours late, and it gives impact on the quality of their service. Therefore, they require a detailed plan to identify their goals such as meet with the customer’s requirements by giving them a good quality of service and food in time (Bhosale, Shilwant, & Patil, 2013). The restaurant owner delegates their service delivery work properly with a clear action plan.

Do: The action plan is not completed until the lists of problems are identified that have an impact on the customer service. The problems are delivering of food 2 hours late; the purchase order is not prepared on time, and the quality of the food is not healthily for the customers.

Check: After the completion of the problem analysis, the restaurant owner calls a team to compile with the list of problems as well as its respective solutions (Gershon & Rajashekharaiah, 2013).  The information is shared with the team such that they understand to avoid the problems and fix them.

Act: After fixing the problems, the restaurant owner ensures that those problems are not carried on the next time.

The four different types of service customers are:

Marketing and Sales: The marketing of the local tavern carries through a contact center consists of sending outbound emails, surveys, responding to the customer’s queries with a management of the marketing campaigns (Heskett, 2013). The local tavern offers entertainment as well as love music to the customers.

Technical support: The customers are required technical support such as verification of the customer’s data; address any updates as well as problem resolution through the technical help desk. The billings of the sells products are done using the technical database system.  

Customer requirement: After analyzing the requirements of the customers, the local tavern gives discounted period and happy hours in order to encourage off-peak time patronage (Kapucu, Yuldashev, & Bakiev, 2016). The local tavern fills to capacity to realize cover accuse and least drink purchase necessity during the peak hours.  

Relationship Builders: The employees of the local tavern build relations with their customers by celebrating occasions at the local tavern (Cheng & Humphreys, 2013).  It builds a strong relationship with the customers, they faster a lively and convivial atmosphere with introducing new drinks, food, and other entertainment options.

Four Different Types of service Customers

The most associated type of customer service is relationship builders, as in order to get profitability in any business, the owner always requires building a strong relationship with the customers. As the customers play a vital key role in the profitability as well as productivity of business.

The two generic strategies for capacity management are as follows:

Cost leadership: It is the lowest cost of operation within the industry. It is driven by the efficiency of the company, size, and scope. This strategy aims to exploit the production scale, a good purchasing approach, production of high-standardized products using advanced technology. It is used to gain a competitive advantage over the competitors by reducing the operational costs (Di, Kondo, & Cirne, 2012). The three ways that the company can achieve cost leadership strategy are firstly offering the products at a cheaper rate than their competitors are. Secondly, the business achieves by efficient large scale as well as supply chain. Thirdly, the products are sourced from cheap household suppliers and the low wage the foreign markets.

Differentiation: This differentiation strategy approach helps the business market unique products from various customer segments. The products are differentiated by sustaining an expensive advertising campaign. The three ways that the company can achieve differentiation strategy are firstly by enhancing the product attributes in such a way that can add value to the buyers (Modi, Wiles, & Mishra, 2015). Secondly, it is achieved using technology and thirdly through the usage of the brand and innovative features.

The grocery shop should use low cost leadership strategy for everyday low prices in order to attract the customers. They can offer low prices for the products at cheaper rates than their competitors rather than relying on the sales. The owner of the grocery shop can source their products from the cheap domestic suppliers that allow the business to trade their products at low price and earnings their margins at high volume.

Different types of Queue configurations are as follows:

Custom queue configuration: It provides a mechanism between high as well as low priority traffic. With this type of queue configuration, there is traffic in the high priority queue that sent in front of other traffic regardless of how to take in order to transmit (Raassens, Wuyts, & Geyskens, 2014). Using the custom queue configuration, the advantages is that the optometrist shop stores as well as manages reports as well as outgoing documents in the document. The disadvantage is that each of the queues has various forms of weight and size.

Comparison and Contrast of Two Generic Strategies for Capacity Management

Priority queue configuration: It provides with a capability to allocate the traffic precise interfaces as well as administration protocols into divide low, medium as well as high priority queues. The advantage of priority queue configuration in is that optometrist shop high priority traffic is processed first, and the disadvantage is that lower priority queues can receive no service at all. 

Customer queue configuration should be used, as in order to configure it, the traffic must be identified by the protocol and within the access list.

Call center outsourcing is contracted out the call center services. It is done in-house and through separate division in the company or overseas. The call centers are handling the customer service problems from the credit card to appliance warranties. The implications of service outsourcing within call centers are that it is cost effective in order to locate the call centers in areas that consist of lower cost of living (Stavrulaki & Davis, 2014). As the costs of living within the United States are increasing, therefore, the businesses found that it is cheaper to locate the call centers overseas. The business that requires expanding to foreign markets is established a local call center staffed with the employees that can speak that language (Heskett, 2013). The advantage of outsourcing is that the business gets better revenue realization as well as enhances returns on investment.

The following are the different roles of inventory in the services such as:

Supply chain: The inventory with transport, the location of the production spaces as well as storage symbolize important factor, which powers the presentation of the supply chain. Inventory consists of the raw materials; work in process as well as ended products of the supply chain. The sporting goods store uses the supply chain management in order to avoid stockouts and manages the seasonal peaks (Johanson & Mattsson, 2015). The challenge is that industries plan and forecast to make sure enough inventories in order to meet demand without stocking too many products.

Service quality: Inventory plays an important role in the services as most of the services take goods and materials as the inputs such as maintenance as well as repair of services in order to provide with a high quality of services. The sporting goods store should have a high quality of equipment and products so that it results in increase of customers (Cheng & Humphreys, 2012). The service quality should be better than their competitors should.

The information technology assists to create competitive advantage throughout the inventory management by implementing an ERP system in order to manage inventory of the auto body repair shop. The effective inventory management maximizes the net profit to minimize the investment in inventory. With automated management of the inventory within the warehouse with the use of ERP based inventory control system, it helps to maintain a right quality of right item within a right location at an accurate time (Raassens, Wuyts, & Geyskens, 2014). The auto body repair shop uses the collision repair technicians for precise measurements as well as hydraulic technology in order to reshape the automobile to their original form.

References

Bhosale, S. D., Shilwant, S. C., & Patil, S. R. (2013). Quality improvement in manufacturing processes using SQC tools. International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications (IJERA) ISSN, 2248-9622.

Cheng, M. M., & Humphreys, K. A. (2012). The differential improvement effects of the strategy map and scorecard perspectives on managers’ strategic judgments. The Accounting Review, 87(3), 899-924.

Di, S., Kondo, D., & Cirne, W. (2012, September). Characterization and comparison of cloud versus grid workloads. In 2012 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (pp. 230-238). IEEE.

Gershon, M., & Rajashekharaiah, J. (2013). How many steps to quality? From Deming cycle to DMAIC. International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 11(4), 475-489.

Heskett, J. L. (2013). Controlling customer logistics service. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management.

Johanson, J., & Mattsson, L. G. (2015). Internationalisation in industrial systems—a network approach. In Knowledge, Networks and Power (pp. 111-132). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Kapucu, N., Yuldashev, F., & Bakiev, E. (2016). Collaborative public management and collaborative governance: Conceptual similarities and differences. European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, 2(1), 39-60.

Modi, S. B., Wiles, M. A., & Mishra, S. (2015). Shareholder value implications of service failures in triads: The case of customer information security breaches. Journal of Operations Management, 35, 21-39.

Raassens, N., Wuyts, S., & Geyskens, I. (2014). The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 31(3), 280-292.

Stavrulaki, E., & Davis, M. M. (2014). A typology for service supply chains and its implications for strategic decisions. Service Science, 6(1), 34-46.