OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT - Essay Example J. Heinz Co’s Resources 40 2.3.1.1 Increase Competiveness 45 2.3.1.2 Long-term Sustainability 49 2.3.1.3 Corporate Social Responsibility 54 2.4 Porter’s Value Chain Framework 59 2.4.1 H. J. Heinz Co’s Porter’s Value Chain 59 3.0 Conclusion 70 4.0 Bibliography 73 1.0 Introduction H.J.Heinz Company was started in the year 1900 in Pennsylvania and it manufactures a vast range of food products throughout the world. The Company’s principal products include ketchup, condiments and sauces, frozen food, soups, beans and pasta meals, infant nutrition and other food products (HJ Heinz Company, 2005). The company is present in over 110 major locations worldwide, with leading brands on six continents. The Heinz brand is a $2.5 billion global icon and Heinz's top-15 power brands account for two-thirds of annual sales (HJ Heinz Company, 2006). With more than $8 billion in annual sales, Heinz's 50 companies have leading brands in more than 200 countries (HJ Heinz Company, 2009). In the year ending 2010, it achieved sales of $10.5 billion and gross profit of $3.8 billion (HJ Heinz Company, 2010). These positive results reflected increased innovation and marketing and dynamic growth in Emerging Markets. However, one of the core aspects of the company is also its unique lean production techniques which have played a major part in enhancing the efficiency of the company while at the same time managing to survive tough global markets especially for a US based company tackling recession. 2.0 Discussion 2.1 Evaluation on H. J. Heinz Co 2.1.1 Definition of Lean Production Lean production simply means a manufacturing paradigm that improves product quality; reduce production costs and being able to respond to customer needs quickly (Radhakrishnan and Balasubramanian, 2008). The main principles of lean focus on the methods of creating a continuous improving culture that engages employees in reducing production time and material in order to meet custome r’s needs. Lean production also concentrates on systematic elimination of non-valued added activity of waste from the production and implementation process of lean principles (Chalice, 2007), which will contribute an improvement environment performance (Radhakrishnan and Balasubramanian, 2008). The term lean production can be traced to its origins with Japanese companies more specifically in the Automobile market which faced issues like lack of resources including financial and labour. At this stage of crisis, two employees of Toyota Motors namely Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno developed this unique concept to manage such a crisis focusing solely on terminating waste in a production or manufacturing process which is called as Lean Manufacturing in the western region. 2.1.2 H. J. Heinz Co’s Lean Production Being a global food processing company, Heinz critically needs to leverage its production aligning with its strategy of waste management. While the company has extensiv ely worked on various lean production and waste management cases, research will focus on one of the major cases of the company where waste management was successfully done Amongst its other global strategies, when Heinz chose to give priority to waste management, it realized that technology would be one of the key aspects if it were to successfully compete in the industry and reduce waste. After careful analysis of several competitive applications, Heinz chose an enterprise asset