Discuss the below:
• What are the factors and keys influencing product design?
• What are the design differences between manufacturing and service products?
• What is the definition of an operations and supply chain strategy?
• Why does statistical quality control lead to improvements in many businesses?
• How do you execute statistical quality control?
Core competency is vital in order for a firm to break out into the market and hold its value and position. Core competency is, according to Jacobs & Chase (2014), "The one thing that a firm can do better than its competitors. The goal is to have a core competency that yields a long-term competitive advantage to the company" (p. 43). Just like anything else in life, if you want to achieve success you must not only contain a quality that is better than your surrounding competition, but then you must also know how to exploit that and utilize that quality to your advantage. Core competencies also have three main characteristics, Jacobs & Chase (2014) list them as, "1) It provides potential access to a wide variety of markets. 2) It increases perceived customer benefits. 3) It is hard for competitors to imitate" (p. 43). A personal example I could use of a company effectively establishing its core competency within a market is the Jeep brand, namely the Wrangler model. Recently, I purchased a Jeep Wrangler. With this vehicle, they created a stylish, rugged, truck/wagon that can withstand and take on any mix of weather and terrain. There is not any other car company that makes a car model fitting these certain specifications. They also fit the three main characteristics of a core competency. Jeep Wranglers are accessible across the world, increase customer perception of vehicle value, and there is just nothing like a driving a Wrangler. There is a sort of aura that comes with driving one, and once you buy one, you have now entered a Jeep Wrangler club. I find people waving at me in other Jeep Wranglers to show recognition. This is Jeep branding and expressing a core competency to it's fullest. That is also why these models tend to come at higher prices and hold their value.
To fully understand this question, you must understand the difference between manufacturing and service products. Manufacturing produces tangible products and have inventory, whereas a service does not have neither. Manufacturing produces goods for the customer but, may not need a customer order up front before manufacturing the product, whereas, service has to have customers to provide the service. A service firm recruits people with knowledge, whereas a manufacturing may have robots to do the labor. Service firms do not require a physical production site, whereas, manufacturing products does.
Manufacturing production has to design for the customer, other words have to match the product to the customer. However, service has to provide an experience for the customer, not a product. As per examples in the reading, Disneyland positions employees with cameras within the park to take pictures of visitors at a memorable location.
The saying goes, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". This is especially true when referring to the cost of quality, namely prevention costs. Prevention costs are pretty self-explanatory, they're costs that cover prevention of defects or errors of any sort throughout a whole process or system. Prevention can include identification, corrective actions, training, redesigning, and any sort of preventative modification (p. 298). Besides prevention costs, costs of quality can include appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and external failure costs. These four categories of costs are essential for properly managing quality whether it be through a program internally or externally.
Recently I noticed, at a retail store, a rack of clothes with a sale sign above it. When I observed more closely, I realized the brand names were very popular and expensive, so I was surprised to see that they were on the sale rack. Then I noticed little sewing defects on all the clothes. Some were very slight and minuscule, while others were extremely noticeable. But I figured that was the reason for all of them being on sale. Now, as I read through the text, I understand what an external failure costs are through a real-life, tangible example that I just recently experienced. According to Jacobs & Chase (2014) external failure costs are, "Costs for defects that pass through the system: customer warranty replacements, loss of customers or goodwill, handling complaints, and product repair" (p. 299). Those clothing companies are experiencing a cost, or decrease in revenue, due to a defect in the sewing of their clothes. This can cause questions of brand and product quality, so the costs may have more of an effect than initially thought.
The control chart is a graph used to study how a process changes over time, and the date is plotted in time order. A control chart always has a central line for the average, an upper line for the upper control limit and a lower line for the lower control limit. These lines are determined from historical data. By comparing current data to these lines, you can draw conclusions about whether the process variation is consistent (in control) or is unpredictable (out of control, affected by special causes of variation).
Like you stated Julie, the control chart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control. Typically control charts are used for time-series data but they can also be used for data that have logical comparability, that is, you want to compare samples that were taken all at the same time. However, the type of chart used to do this depends on several factors.