Operations Management

1. Introduction

The technological breakthrough in recent years has caused very fast resources and information exchanges. Consequently, consumer trends and tastes have changed more quickly and competitions have also become more severe. In order to survive the ever-changing environment and acute competition, it is essential for businesses to manage their operations well at the aim of save costs and improve efficiency.

Operations Management is the activity of managing the resources and processes that produce products and services (Slack et al 2009). The purpose of this essay is to identify at which stage of the Hayes and Wheelwright model the chosen company - Noble Pacific Limited (NPL) is currently located, reinforced by its competitive advantages and operations management objectives.

2. The Company

NPL is a very famous plastic product original equipment manufacturing (OEM) company located in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, China. It majorly performs mold production, injection, spray coating, vacuum metallization, assembly and packaging services for electronic appliance cases, cosmetic containers and confectionary boxes.

3. The Market

The competition of the Plastic Product Industry in China is extremely severe due low labour costs. Many foreign and local entrepreneurs have been setting up their own factories all over China. In order to survive the competition, it is necessary for businesses to provide high quality and on time products and services at a reasonable cost. NPL's customers also reminded them to adopt new technologies and develop new products and services in order to retain its market share.

4. Hayes and Wheelwright's Four-Stage Model

Hayes and Wheelwright's Four-Stage Model provides views to operations as moving from implementation of strategy, through supporting strategy and finally driving strategy (Slack et al 2009). NPL is currently at the Stage III of the model.

Stage III of the model is the stage where the company's operations are probably one of the best companies in the market. The company has a manufacturing organization that is internally supportive of other parts of the company, with a co-coordinated set of internal structural and infrastructural decisions tailored to their specific competitive strategy (Lai 2012).

NPL's corporate strategy is to obtain continuous growth and development together with its customers and employees by driving all the staffs within the organization to cooperate closely at the aim of providing high quality, environmental friendly and on time one-stop plastic production services to its customers.

The company is very famous of its high quality and on time production services in Guangdong Province. Many famous multinational organizations are its loyalty customers, such as Gucci, Chanel and Dior of the Cosmetic Industry; Panasonic, Samsung and TCL of the Electronics Industry; Morishita Jintan and Hershey's of the Confessionary Industry.

The major reason of the company's success is its operational excellence. In more than 10 years after its inception, the company has successfully developed its own set of organizational structure, clear policies and guidelines to ensure efficient operations of every department. The company has also obtained ISO9001 and ISO14001 which are the evidences of efficient operation and management systems, as well as clean productions. Therefore, the organization's functions can always effectively support the organization's objectives and business strategies.

Thanks to the loyalty customers, the company has enough capital for research and development of new production technologies, as well as purchase of new production equipments. Therefore, it can constantly satisfy customer needs on new product effects and the sudden increases in order quantity. The company's operation management is so mature that all departments within the organization are capable to deal with orders of different designs and specifications. Also, because communications and cooperations among different departments are effective enough, project teams can be easily formed to complete every single order successfully as project-based approaches can increase the chance of success (Oakland and Tanner 2007).

5. Contribution to Competitive Advantage

As NPL is already one of the most famous plastic product OEM factories in the Guangdong Province, this part of the essay is going to investigate into the 4Vs of the company to see how the company differentiates from its competitors.

5.1 Volume

The company has 5 imported CNC and EDM machines for mould productions, more than 40 sets of plastic injection machines, 2 dual-colour injection machines, 4 fully automatic spray coating lines and 2 vacuum metallization machines, which can complete more than 50 sets of production moulds within one month, and perform injection, coating and vacuum metallization operations for more than 40 million pieces of plastic products. Today, the company's production capacity is 40% higher than its close competitors in the Guangdong Province.

5.2 Variety

Most of the plastic product OEM factories in China only provide simple moulding and injection services to customers because imported moulding machines, precision injection machines, fully automatic spray coating lines, as well as vacuum metallization ovens are very expensive and require high technological know-how. Also, if the production process is more complex, efficient communications and cooperations among different departments is essential.

Apart from ordinary moulding and injection services, NPL also provides CNN and EDM moulding services, dual-colour injection services, UV coating, silk printing and the very environmental friendly vacuum metallization services to its customers, which enable the company to become the ultimate one-stop solution to plastic products.

5.3 Variation

Many of the company's close competitors only focus on providing plastic product production services to one single industry. NPL has successfully broadened its product range in 2003 by providing services to different industries to ensure more stable order quantities. Since many industries like the electronic industry are very seasonal, if the company does not diversify, the factory will suffer from unstable and seasonal orders.

5.4 Visibility

Unlike its competitors, NPL always welcomes its customers to visit its production plants to monitor the production processes because the company is proud of its equipments and efficient