Emezed Motors Ltd is a renowned automotive manufacturing company. In the current year, Emezed Motors has made modifications to all its cars to keep up with technological advancements. Emezed Motors Ltd has a manufacturing department, an assembly department and a finishing department. The manufacturing department manufactures individual parts and passes them to the assembly department. The assembly department assembles the individual parts to give them a structure and passes the product to the finishing department. The finishing department makes the final fixes to make the product ready for sale.

Until last year, Emezed Motors was able to reach its target sales and was able to recover its cost of operations. However, in the first three quarters of the current year, the company has been unable to reach 50 per cent of its target sales.

The top management of the company was worried about this trend, and they asked the sales team for an explanation. The sales team pointed out that the number of cars manufactured was not enough to meet demand.

The top management of the company hired you as an independent consultant to find the root cause for the insufficient production. You have inspected the manufacturing and assembly departments of the company and identified the problems listed below.

		The manufacturing department is facing operational inefficiencies because of which there is a delay in the supply of individual parts to the assembly department.
		The assembly department is unable maintain sufficient inventory to meet demand because of the long production cycle and the 4-week lead time in receiving individual parts from the manufacturing department.
		The number of skilled workers in the workforce of the manufacturing department has reduced in the current year, and the existing workers are unable to manufacture the required number of individual parts.
		The paperwork required to place an order with the manufacturing department is time consuming.
		In the assembly department, many unskilled workers were hired to meet customer demand. This has led to excessive damage of materials and individual parts.
		The manufacturing and assembly departments have a large capacity. However, there are only two supervisors to monitor and delegate work in these departments. This has led to a lot of slack time in the production cycle.
		In the current year, the company has made some modifications to all the cars it manufactures to keep up with technological advancements. The company is purchasing new raw materials required for these modifications from a supplier who is situated in a remote location. The company is spending a lot of time in transporting the raw materials from the suppliers location to their location. This has added to the delay in production. Also, the transportation costs incurred for transporting raw materials from these suppliers are not efficiently spread across the raw materials ordered.

Based on the operational problems you have identified at Emezed Motors, you have proposed that the company implement business process re-engineering to increase its efficiency. Management has decided to accept the proposal. However, the workers are sceptical and afraid of losing their jobs. ANSWER ALL SEVEN QUESTIONS.

Questions 1. Which of the following steps would you suggest the management of Emezed Motors take to address the operational inefficiencies in its manufacturing department?

A. Hire additional skilled workforce and train the existing unskilled workforce.

B. Accept additional orders with the existing workforce to eliminate the inefficiencies.

C. Increase the operational hours and install additional machines to meet the demand of the assembly department.

D. Improve the warehouse and storage facilities to avoid any slack in operationsB.

Question 2. Which of the following steps would you suggest the management of Emezed Motors take to address the operational inefficiencies in its manufacturing department? A. Hire additional skilled workforce and train the existing unskilled workforce. B. Accept additional orders with the existing workforce to eliminate the inefficiencies. C. Increase the operational hours and install additional machines to meet the demand of the assembly department. D. Improve the warehouse and storage facilities to avoid any slack in operations.

Question 3. Which of the following steps would you suggest the assembly department of Emezed Motors take to help the department maintain sufficient inventory to meet demand? (Check all that apply.) A. Reduce lead time and obtain sufficient individual parts inventory from the manufacturing department on time. B. Increase the set-up time so that sufficient time is available for moving materials from the manufacturing department to the assembly department. C. Place frequent orders with the manufacturing department to avoid the risk of insufficient inventories of individual parts. Increase the time taken to assemble the cars to 5 weeks to avoid the problem of insufficient inventory.

Question 4. The paperwork required to place an order with the manufacturing department is time consuming. Which of the following is the most efficient action that will help Emezed Motors in reducing this time?

A. Install an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help integrate the inventory requests across departments efficiently.

B. Hire only one supervisor for both the manufacturing and the assembly departments, so that the supervisor is aware of the progress in both the departments and can finish the paperwork efficiently.

C. Place large orders to avoid recurring paperwork.

D. Hire additional administrative staff to take care of paperwork that is required to place an order with the manufacturing department.

Question 5. You have suggested that Emezed Motors implement business process re-engineering (BPR). The starting point of the approach is to decide on the steps to do something faster or cheaper or better.

yes or no?

Question 6. The suppliers of the new materials are situated in a remote location. Which of the following steps would you recommend to address this issue efficiently?

a. Relocate the manufacturing and assembly departments close to the suppliers location.

b. Change the production cycle to meet the suppliers requirement.

c. Find and acquire the services of new suppliers close to the companys location.

d. Increase the number of suppliers in the existing structure.

Question 7. Which of the following actions will address the issue of job insecurity and will help workers understand the need for change? a. Set up another manufacturing unit to take additional orders and to fasten the production phase. b. Shuffle workers between the assembly department and the manufacturing department, and provide additional time for them to complete their work. c. Provide training to the existing unskilled workers. d.Deploy additional machinery, and reward workers for putting in additional efforts to meet demand.