Literature Review of Operations Improvement

Portsmouth Business School

Principles Of Operations & Marketing Management
(U20590)

Student number 671740

Table of Contents
Part One: Literature Review 3
Performance Measurement 3
Performance Objectives 3
Performance Standards 4
Benchmarking 4
Four Pitfalls In Performance Measurement 5
Approaches to improvement 6
PDCA Cycle 6
DMAIC cycle 8
Part Two: Case Study --- Toyota 12
Continuous Improvement 12
TPS --- Toyota Production System 13
Kaizen 14
Kaizen And PDCA Cycle 15
Failure Of TPS 17
Appendix 17
Lean Operations And Just-In-Time 17
What is just-in-time? 18
The impact of JIT 18
JIT in services 19
Reference 19

Part One: Literature Review

Performance Measurement

Performance measurement is used to evaluate some kind of organizational entities, such as organization, process, team or individual, in terms of quality and quantity that is achieved in the mission, objectives, goals, and etc. Performance can be measured in terms of the degree to which the operations fulfil performance objectives at any point in time, in order to satisfy customers. Improvement is the activity of closing the gap between the current and the desired performance of an operation or process. (Slack et al, 2012) There are two major influences on deciding improvement priorities, the needs and preference of customers and the performance and activities of competitors. (Baxter, L. F., MacLeod, A. M., 2008)

Performance Objectives

There are five performance objectives, which are to be achieved: quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost. It can represented on a Polar diagram.

The polar diagram below illustrates the relative importance of each of the performance objectives for these two services in different stages. The main point here is that the two types of service offered by the company have very different characteristics in terms of which performance objectives are important. As time goes by, the situation will...