In this post we talk about Trends and Future Prospective of Operation Management. Today's market is continuously changing and customer needs and educations are also widely varied and changing. The high quality of products and service and their associated customer satisfaction are the key to survival for any enterprise.
Trends and Future Prospective of Operation Management
The nature of the current worldwide competition generally demands from any company, the following four types of ability characteristics:
- To understand what the customer wants and to produce it, immediately on demand at lowest cost.
- To provide products and service of high quality and reliability consistently.
- To keep up with the pace of change, technological as well as political and social.
- To be one step ahead of the customer's needs; that is, to predict what
To have these abilities on any organization, there is the strong role of operation management. The current issues and future trends in operations include the following
Intense competition:
The intensity of worldwide competition will increase. The military warfare in twentieth century is continuously replaced by economic warfare. There is a wide spread internal competition and global competition. The establishment of WTO in January first 1995, has make the international trade a new set of values based on the non-discrimination, transparency, predictability, probation of fare trade and trade liberalization.
Nepal's accession to WTO from 23rd April 2004 has opened our market to international players and we will be facing intense competition on our homeland too. However our membership in WTO has also created ample opportunity for national producer to explore the international market with out any discrimination.
Global markets, global sourcing and global financing:
It is continuously being harder to survive by competing in the domestic market alone Companies now have to compete globally. Hence they must understand foreign customer, build networks and foreign partnerships. Production will be carried wherever in the world, where it can be done on cheapest cost. Access to capital markets will be worldwide and the development c E-Commerce will make an international trade very easier and competitive too
Importance of strategy:
Companies will need long-term global strategies o survive in the marketplace. Strategies should be made for the future prospective of not only the internal market but the external market and competition also. Hence it is necessary to create the understanding relation/ partnership with the various institutions and organization./A new type of capitalism based on co-operative specialization industries may become a necessity.
More product variety:
An increasing variety of products and service will be offered to the customer. It will cause the expected life of product on the market to decrease. Products and service innovations will hit the market at an increasing rate. Those will source who, that can predict the latent requirement of customer and produce the product/ service accordingly.
More service:
Not only the more innovative product will be on market diverse type of service will be provided to the customer. The service sector will continuously expand; the level of service associated with the service sector and the manufacturing sector will increase. Customer service is destined to become another competitive battleground.
Emphasis on quality:
The quality of products and service will continue to improve as customer expectations on quality grow. The betterment growth of organization with customer satisfaction and continual growth will be the vision of organization. The organization will move towards total quality management and third party certification like ISO 9001:2000 HACCP and GMP will be more practiced by industries to assure customer and continual improvement of organizations.
Flexibility:
The most successful production system will be those that are most flexible. Flexibility will be measured by the ability to adjust to change in product design, changes in product mix, changes in the volume of demand, and changes in process technology. To met the varied need of customer, the production system will be more flexible.
Advances in technology:
Technology will be continuously advanced at rapid rate; particularly the used computers and robots will be increased The automation and automation will be more practiced.
Environmental concern:
Customer will prefer the environmental friend products and service only. There will be enteric environmental concerned to every body. Organization will consider the environmental impact while design, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal of their products and service. Certification of management system with international standards like EMS 14001 will get more importance.
Hence production/operation management on future has to work under these mentioned varied and competitive circumstances. It is the responsibility of POM to make it fit to operate in changed circumstances for growth and development of organization.