INDIVIDUAL OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT REPORT Individual Operations Management Report



Executive Summary

Theoretical scheduling has reached a mature state but there are difficulties in using the theory in practice. One of the issues is the occurrence of disturbances. Studies have been done to investigate the possibility of using control chart techniques to detect disturbances in production planning and scheduling. Appropriate control chart techniques have been developed that avoid statistical problems, assuming that the whole system may be viewed as a dynamic process. To validate the new techniques, data have been collected in two different business sectors. The control charts show their ability to detect changes and their potential for practical implementation.

Table of Content

Introduction4

Problems Description5

Methodology & Results5

Discussion & Recommendation7

Conclusion8

References10

Individual Operations Management Report

Introduction

Statistical Process control (SPC) is a tool which has been successfully used in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. SPC charts were first developed to distinguish between common causes and special causes of variation. The ability to distinguish between the two causes results in improvements in a process by reducing the variation. If no points fall outside the control limits and non-random trends are not evident, the process is said to be stable or in statistical control. Reduction in process variation can be achieved even when the process achieves stability, but radical change may be required. Therefore, SPC charts are tools that can be used to achieve process stability, to provide a guideline to reduce process variation, to assess a process's performance and to provide information for management (Dale ,1994). Classical production planning and scheduling have been viewed as being in a mature state (MacCarthy and Liu, 1993), but there are difficulties in using the theory in practice and many organisations continue to have problems in planning, scheduling and control. Stoop and Wiers (1996) give a number of causes which affect the applicability of scheduling techniques in practice. Disturbances from machine breakdowns, unavailability of raw material, rush orders and human factors may occur frequently.

Problems Description

The principal objective was to evaluate operation management process through Statistical Process Control (SPC).

Methodology & Results

SPC techniques could be applied in order to detect all changes in the process. However, many caveats have been raised in implement SPC charts in non-manufacturing applications (Humble, 1998), (Lewis, 1999), (Finison, et al., 1993), (Wood, 1994). MacCarthy and Wasusri (2000) conducted simulated experiments with different control chart types, dispatching rules and performance measures in order to provide control charts that can work well under production planning and scheduling environments. The data found from experiments simulated environments show correlation and deviate from normally distributed. The classical Shewhart control chart does not work well and tends to give many false alarms. They conclude that the Exponential Weighted Moving Average chart (EWMA) may work well in many circumstances. The SPC chart generates less type I errors because the SPC chart is more robust to data which are correlated and non-normally distributed (Wardell, et al., 1992), (Borror, et al., 1999), (Lu and Reynolds, 1999). The SPC chart is used to monitor the mean value, while the ...