Operation And Project Management For Multi-Facade Field – Critical Evaluation Of Samsung’s Operations Management Decisions

Critical Evaluation of the Operation Management Decisions of Samsung

Describe about the Operation and Project Management for Multi-Facade Field.

Operation management refers to a multi-facade field that keeps its focus on managing all the features of an organization’s operations. Operation manager’s job is making sure that goods and services produced are of good quality. They also play with ideas and technologies to enhance the productivity and decrease cost, to meet the ever-changing customer needs, assuring workplace safety, and high-quality customer service (Betts et al., 2012). Samsung is one of the world’s largest producers of digital media, and digital convergence technology. The main aim of the operations management at Samsung is to maintain the organization’s stability and reliability. This relates to another goal of the organization, and that is to provide the best quality and easy to use products to satisfy the customers if these goals are achieved much other goals of the organization will also be attained like increase of sales and profit for the company (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2008).

To attain its goals company has taken many operating decision out of them three are analysed, and they are as follows:-

Location

The location of the company matters a lot for the organization as it can help increase the cost of the product or help in decreasing it. Samsung is a brand that makes products for all class of people and tries to fulfil all the digital need of the customers. Samsung manufactures TVs, Laptops, Computers, Washing Machines, CD Players, etc. and tries to provide its products and services at best price and in best quality. For this purpose, Samsung has shifted its manufacturing units at countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and China. The reason for shifting the manufacturing units was the low-cost labour and the raw materials (Heizer and Render, 2014). These countries are emerging markets and have a huge population that also provide a huge market for the Samsung products. This increases the profitability ration of the company.

To enhance its market, Samsung is dealing with some products which require expertise while manufacturing, so no technical problem should arise in the manufactured products. But the countries where Samsung has shifted its manufacturing unit do have low-cost labour but the skills and knowledge of these labours are also low as compared to developed countries. Getting skilled labour will again increase the costing of the products which will not be able to attain the goal of reducing the cost of the products due to which the company has shifted its manufacturing unit to these developing countries. Many companies are coming down to these emerging markets with their manufacturing units as they also want low-cost labour and raw materials. This increases the competition in the developing market for Samsung (Kuperman, 2016).

Optimizing Network

As per a survey, customers leave their broadband service because of the slow connection speed. It shows the importance of flawless network experience that operators should offer to retain its customers. By keeping this in mind Samsung Smart products has self-optimizing, healing, and configuring functions like capacity coverage optimization, antenna tilt optimization, automatic neighbour relation, cell outage compensation, transmit power control and, drive test optimization. Another Samsung product the Samsung smart phones have centralized radio resources management, to improve the allocation pattern, maximize throughout and mitigate interference (Lee, Lee and Heo, 2015).

Samsung ensures the excellent network performance through analytical tools that are specially designed to manage, monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the network in real or near real-time. Samsung’s specially designed tools limit the use of highly skilled human resources which reduce the operational cost. All this explains that Samsung’s most operating systems are depended mostly on computerized designed tools. This is a very good use of technologies but this also has to keep in mind that technology also fails. If there is some break down in the digitalized working of the company, then no human resources will be available in the company, to sort the problem. As the company prefers using the specially designed tools only that limit the use of human resources. Thus, it is recommended to employee a maintenance department for such breakdowns (Mahadevan, 2010).

Samsung has worked very hard to create the brand image of the company. The company has decided to become the official sponsor of 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. It combined the global sports brand with the wireless technology that company was producing and selling at that time. The promotion that Samsung got at that time was astonishing, and it became the household brand name. Not only South Korea, Samsung became famous throughout the world in all the fifty countries it was selling its products at that time (Main, 2012). Even today the company follows the promotional activities through advertising their products on television as it is the most popular means of media in the present times. Whenever Samsung launches a new product, it started the campaigning of its product on television and social media. Using this promotional activity is proving to be very beneficial for the company from very long time. Samsung has a huge budget for the promotion of all the products the company launches (Nogalski and Niewiadomski, 2014).

Marketing of the Products

Though in today’s time advertising a product is very important to create awareness and inform the potential customers about the new product manufactured by the company. Many features that company shows in the advertisements does not necessary be useful for the person getting attracted to it and purchasing it. When such thing happens then, the customer feels to be deceived by the company. This breaks the customer loyalty. The next time that person will select the other company’s product rather than Samsung. Sometimes a product gets overly advertised which in place of attracting customers, irritate them (Park, Park and Jeong, 2014). The result is the disassociation of the customer with the product. Samsung spends a lot of money on it advertising campaign but that expenses are ultimate increases the costing of the products. Hence, it becomes very important to have a stabilized budget for the products of the company, so it does not overly increase the prices of the products, and potential customers get attracted to it (Peck and Sinding, 2009).

All the companies have their corporate strategies and to achieve those companies has to identify their operational performance objectives. Once all the performance objectives get identified measures are decided to ensure that all the performance objectives are met, by the company. When all these performance objectives are met, they help the company to fight against the competition present in the market. The main five performance objectives are the quality, dependability, costs, flexibility, and speed. Samsung also aims to achieve the goals set by the company and become the number one electronic company in the world (Pinto, 2015). How these performance objectives can help the Samsung in achieving its targets is discussed below: –

Quality

The measure taken by the company to meet the customer’s expectations regarding the products and services manufactured by it is known as quality. It is very hard to measure, but quality is taken to be the huge influence in customer’s satisfaction and also influences the other operations objectives. Quality performance objective helps the company in increasing its competitive position in the market in the following way: –

Quality reduces cost- if a company manufactures defective and low-quality product than they have to pay compensation or even take the product back and give the new one, which wastes a lot of money and time. Thus, giving good quality products reduces such useless and unwanted expenses (Schmidle, 2011).

The Operating Objectives that Increases the Competitive Advantage

Quality attracts customers- customers want to purchase hassle-free products for themselves. If the company provides quality products, then the customer will come back to the same company for future purchases.

Quality increases speed- quality is not an external objective that can be measured quickly; it is an internal objective that can only be detected once the customer uses the product. If a product has some quality defect, then the company has to spend time in finding the defect that will waste a lot of time. If the product quality is good, then no such problems will arise, and the customer will also be satisfied with the product. Thus, adding a competitive advantage to the company (Slack et al., 2009).

The time phase between the customer request and the delivery of the product and services is known as speed performance objective. It reflects the quick response of the company to the customer request. The enhanced and quick operations cycle increases the customer satisfaction. If the customer gets the quick and correct response from the company, it will make future purchases also from the same company because of their prompt response. With the quick response, the customer gets it product delivered quickly then the company does not have to pay for the storage charges. Thus, speed performance objective act as an added advantage for the company to increase its competitive position in the market (Wei and Hsu, 2008).

Dependability performance objective reflects the dependability that customer can show in the company. This dependability refers to the promise of the company regarding the products and services. If a company can provide the products and service to the customers when they need it or at the time promised by the company then the company is regarded as dependable (Yang and Yang, 2012). Dependability can help the company to increase its competitive advantage by the following ways:-

Dependability increase speed- delivering the product on time produces an efficient operating cycle which ultimately increases the operating speed. If a product does not deliver on time then disruption occurred due to it can hamper the operating cycle hence wasting time.

Dependability reduces cost- when an item does not deliver on time then it has to be stored for a longer period than anticipated which increases the storage costing and also disturbs the operating cycle because the next products that were supposed to take the place of that product will be delayed. Thus, it becomes important that the product gets delivered on time which will help in decreases various expenses (Yulianda and Handayani, 2015).

If a customer finds a company dependable then in future also it will purchase products from the same company, thus increasing the popularity of the company and making it competitive.

The reflection of the company’s adaptability in the operation process with the changes likes what to do, how to do, and when to deliver. When referred as an operations performance objective flexibility provides the company the product and services flexibility, delivery-time flexibility, volume flexibility and mix flexibility regarding product and services. Flexibility performance objective includes and affects many sides of the operations (Betts et al., 2012). The way in which flexibility increases the competitive advantage of the company are as follows: –

Flexibility increases speed- if all the resources in the operating system is flexible than time will not be wasted, and no change request will come which will result in the increase of the customer satisfaction. If customers get satisfied with the product, then it will increase the chances of future sales which increase the competitive advantage of the company.

Flexibility maintains dependability- flexibility of internal operations help to keep the operations system on schedule even when there are some unexpected events. This increases the dependability of the company which led to the increase in the competitive advantage of the company (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2008).

Cost

The most important factor for a company is the operating cost as it affects the final price of the product. The operating cost help in making the product affordable for the customers which finally affects the business portability. The lower operating cost means, the lower costing of the product which can enable the company to reduce the final price of the product and provide the best price with the best quality to the customers increases the competitive advantage of the company. This makes cost the most attractive performance objective. The ways cost increases the competitive advantage of the company by increasing the productivity. It not only help in increasing overall profitability of the company but by making better use of operating objectives get better output from them (Heizer and Render, 2014).

Conclusion

Operation Management helps the company smoothly run its business and its operations. It focuses on all the operations of the company. Samsung Company is one of the largest electronic company selling products all over the world. For them, all the operating decisions are very important, and three of them are critically evaluated here to find the pros and cons of the decisions taken by the company. After that, the five main performance objectives of the company is discussed and explained how they help a company gain a competitive advantage in the market. Hence, the operation management and its objective are very important for a company to succeed in the competition. 

References

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