Playmouth Plants Assesment (Essay Sample)

Playmouth plant Assessment
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Certain external and internal factors make the Plymouth plant exhibit great potentials for future growth. To start with, the market for the firm’s products is stable and is expected to grow bigger in the long-run. Secondly, its product designs are competitive and flexible enough to cope with future market demands. Thirdly, the firm sells its products at competitive prices and has recently designed new pricing models that are expected to exhibit more competitive capabilities than the current models. Finally, its workforce is loyal, enthusiastic and skilful; therefore, it delivers quality services. These strongholds, if utilized well, can lead to a better Playmouth Plant than the current one.
The Playmouth Plant, however, has a strong weakness that overcomes its strengths; something that exposes it to high business risks. This weakness concerns the quality of its products. The weakness is intense due to the fact that it affects the customers, who are the firm’s most important stakeholders (Ayuso et al. 2007). Of late, the Playmouth Plant has been receiving increasing numbers of customers with complaints about the quality of its products. Cases where customers bring back sold items for rework or repair due to poor product quality have also been rampant in the recent days. Consequently, customers’ loyalty towards the brand of pumps offered by the firm has been decreasing rapidly. Due to this reason, many customers have been reluctant to place long-term repeat orders with the firm, making the volumes of sales that it makes extremely low.
The use of old and outdated machineries has been identified as one of the major factors causing the production of poor quality products and loss of money in the Playmouth Plant. Specifically, the firm’s manufacturing process machinery and final product test machines are old and outdated, and thus work inefficiently, hence causing design and production of poor quality pumps. The two machineries have also broken down frequently, thus making the firm to lose a lot of money in forms of the money paid for repair of the machineries and used for purchasing spare parts for the machineries.
With the situation explained above, it is apparent that the Playmouth Plant is at a risk of being shut down. In this regard, there is a need for the formulation of both short and long-term strategies that can be used in saving the firm from closure. This paper denotes a review of previous literatures that contains useful information that could help in the formulation of such strategies. The reviewed literature materials were selected based on their relevance to the problem at hand. Essentially, recent: research studies, books, magazines, journal articles and seminar proceedings that contain the most relevant information concerning; management of product quality, possible approaches to product quality management and recent discoveries about management methods and strategies were selected as literature materials for this paper.
For many people, craftsmanship and workmanship are probably the first words that come to mind every time that product quality is described. Research, however, indicates other various definitions of product quality that are more suitable than just perfect craftsmanship and workmanship. A research by Rijn (2010) defined product quality as simply the customers’ perception of product design or in other words the extent to which customers expect the design of a product to look like. In another study, Garvin (1994) defines product quality as the extent to which the design of a product matches the original specifications. He also defines it as the ability of a product to satisfy stated or implied needs. In a book written by Prahalad and Krishnan (2009), product quality is defined as the ability of a product to conform to the established requirements. From the above definitions, the term product quality can generally be referred to as the ability of a product to conform to how customers expect it to satisfy them. In this regard, managers should be more concerned with customers’ response to the product’s design than any other thing when managing product quality.
According to Biolos and Jim (2009), customers always require guarantees of the quality of products and services they anticipate to buy. Consequently, they prefer the company that supplies the most guaranteed products and services in terms of the product/service quality. Owing in mind to this, the management of production companies spends a lot of time and resources in trying to improve the quality of their products and services so that their products/services can acquire a market advantage over those of their competitors (Rijn 2010). Kumar and Theraja (2013), however, in that improving the quality of products does not fully earn confidence from potential buyers. They suggest that the management should not only focus on improving the quality of products, but also obtaining certificates that indicates that the firm maintains product quality.
For more than two decades, product/service quality management has been a leading phrase in the business world. Many business consultants have built careers around this topic, and quality issues in business have been responsible for the success and failure of many organizations and even industries (Baly 2011). According to Flynn et al. (2011) quality management refers to an approach to achieving and sustaining high output. It can also be defined as a comprehensive set of tools that enables an organization to control and manage data related to product quality CITATION Bio09 \l 1033 (Biolos & Jim, 2009). These data include data concerning: product defects, design and manufacturing defects, customers’ complaints over the products, field failures, and product preventative, corrective and improvement actions. The management of this data according to Reardon (2011) is a process composed of four main components, including: quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement. The process does not only focus on the product quality, but also the ways in which it can be attained.
Quality planning involves continuous actions to track and determine the causes behind defects and product failures. This process emphasizes on protection of customers from inferior products and services (Baly 2011). In essence, quality planning involves continuous inspection of products to identify defects associated with the products. In case test result shows that the quality of products is unacceptable, several options including; demolish and reproduce, repair or sorting can be applied (Hicks 2012). With regard to Baly (2011) the last two options are not efficient in instances where the case of poor quality is recurrent. According to Hicks (2012) the first option, although costly is the most efficient in such instances.
Quality control on the other hand, involves the reduction of production, rework, repair and warranty costs through control of the production processes (Rijn 2010). The practice involves inspection of production process machineries, final product test machines, and the workforce to ensure that they are in a position to work up to the maximum expectations. It also involves inspection of inputs to make sure that they don’t vary from the required ones. Essentially, control of production processes and inspection of inputs seeks to do away with all variations that may be associated with the inputs and processes (Hicks 2012). In this regard, controlling the variation of inputs and production processes ensures production of the expected product design, thus controlling the variation of the products’ quality (Reardon 2011).
Planning and control of the product quality have proven to be unsatisfactory for most producers. This is due to the fact that in the modern world, more and more clients are seeking guarantees that products are meeting the set specifications (Rijn 2010). According to Reardon (2011) quality assurance involve control of the assignable causes of variations through standardization. It is a way of coordinating efforts between different support and operating units CITATION Rij10 \l 1033 (Rijn, 2010). Essentially, the coordination is achieved through formalized procedures and standards. In cases where the production process fails to conform to the laid down procedures and standards, corrective actions are taken upon the responsible personnel. According to Rijn (2010), ensuring that these procedures are followed during the production process is useless if it is not made known to the customers that they are adhered to. This can be done through making the company’s standard quality certificates accessible to the customers in the easiest way possible.
Quality planning, quality control and quality assurance tec...