Section 10 - Organisational Structure Flashcards
What is job production?
Making a one off unique product, single + customised, tailor made, meet needs of consumer
What are the advantages of job production?
- Unique
- Higher quality
- Can charge high prices
- High profit margin
What are the disadvantages of job production?
- High costs - materials
- Need skilled workers as labour intensive
- Slower
- Machinery often idle
What is batch production?
Making a group of similar products at once
What are the advantages of batch production?
- Lower unit cost
- Wide product range
- Flexibility
- Less idle machinery
What are the disadvantages of batch production?
- Lots of waste if one batch goes wrong
- Varying quality in batches
- Reliant on one machine
- Costly storage needed
- Lower quality products
What is mass/flow production?
- Making lots of the same product continuously
- Identical
- Made in large quantities
What are the advantages of mass/flow production?
- Quicker
- Cheaper as lower unit costs
- Same quality across all products
- Large outputs
What are the disadvantages of mass/flow production?
- Not unique
- Mistakes result in a lot of wasyte
- Lower quality
- Inflexible
- Repetitive work
- Lower profit margins
In terms of production, how might a business change as it expands?
- Moves from job/batch to mass/flow
- Labour intensive to capital intensive
What are the advantages of moving from batch or job production to mass/flow production (labour to capital intensive) as a business grows?
- Reduced costs for staff as less skilled
- Lower unit costs
- Target larger orders, increase capacity
- Increase efficiency
What are the disadvantages of moving from batch or job production to mass/flow production (labour to capital intensive) as a business grows?
- Initial high costs (machinery)
- Nothing unique, no USP?
- Quality could suffer
- Redundancies
What are the different methods of lean production?
- Kaizen
- JIT (just in time)
- Cell production
What is lean production?
- Cutting away anything that is not necessary for production so no wastage
- Carry no excess at all
- Efficient
- Maximum productivity
What is Kaizen?
Making a product, see how it can be improved, make again, see how can be improved again
What is JIT?
- Just in time
- Where inputs into the production process arrive only when they are needed
- Less storage
- Order when you need it
- Dependence on suppliers (can affect whether you can supply customers
- No economies of scale
What is cell production?
- Where workers organised into multi-skilled teams w/ each team responsible for a particular part of production process
- Teams
- Different skills/ideas
What are the advantages of JIT?
- Saves money on storage
- Less likelihood of wasted stock (e.g. out of date)
- Less build up of unsold product
What are the disadvantages if JIT?
- No room for mistakes as could be costly
- Reliant on suppliers
What are the advantages if cell production?
- More motivation from more variety of work
- Higher quality as each cell has ownership for quality on area
- Members within cell are close so better communication
- Become multi-skilled + more adaptable
- Can cover if one sick
What are the disadvantages of cell production?
- Staff need to be trained
- Have to assign staff enough so they can work efficiently but not overdone
- Can not use machinery as much
What are the advantages of kaizen?
- Constantly making product better
- Adaptable to customer requirements
- Less need for inspection as improved always
- Better teamwork
What are the disadvantages of kaizen?
- Time consuming
- Can be demotivating, accepting failures
- Varying quality
How can a business measure productivity?
- Output per worker, as high as possible
- Labour turnover, low = managing to retain staff, high = might be indicative of problem
