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1. Production and Operations Management by Kanishka Bedi.

2. Case studies in Operations Management Volume I by ICFAI center for

management research.

3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_management

4. www.samsung.com/in/business/index.html

5. www.livemint.com/2010/.../Consumer-electronics-industry.html

6. www.businessworld.in

 


 
 

 









 
 






 

 


   

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  ) This is the first and the most important business processes. It starts with
procurement of right locations for plants and finding the right suppliers for your product.
Activities related to obtaining products and materials from outside suppliers involve resource
planning, supply sourcing, negotiation, order placement, inbound transportation, storage,
handling and quality control, many of which include the responsibility to coordinate with
suppliers on matters of scheduling, supply continuity, hedging, and research into new sources
or programs. Most of the consumer electronics industry players have many suppliers around
the Globe to achieve cost benefits as well as quality standards. Global players like Sony, LG,
Samsung do their procurement as seriously as they do their main operations work. The
procurement department in these companies maintains rapid communication systems like
Electronic data interchange to interact with their suppliers rapidly.

# )In consumer electronics industry, each organization deals with
large number of SKUs. Each of these models generally requires components ranging from 100
to 1000 depending upon the product (ranging from a mobile phone to a refrigerator). Also
these products have a relatively shorter life cycle because of technological innovations,
consumer tastes changes etc. In Nokia all mobile handset has a life cycle of 36 months. After
that period that handset is not manufactured any more. In such a scenario Inventory
management becomes an important task to cut down on costs related to storing such huge
inventory materials. Most of the organization use EcP software to handle resource planning.
Stock out can seriously affect the goodwill of a company. Hence most organization maintains an
additional inventory known as buffer stocks (If Just in Time facility is available companies can do
away with that).

 *** 

+
) Depending upon the customer
preferences and market trends, manufacturers have to quickly come up with new products in
the market. Since the life cycle of these products is short, both customer and supplier have to
be integrated into the production processes, to deliver the product in the timely manner. Some
consumer electronic companies do all manufacturing works. They have their own c D
departments which do necessary research to develop new and better products and parts. Dell
on the other hand does mostly assembling job. It acquires most of the parts for say Laptops
from established players like Intel, IBM etc. and then assemble them to make the final product.
Manufacturing plans are prepared on weekly basis. Machine as well as man power scheduling is
done on weekly and daily basis.

( *  

) Until early 1990s, Whirlpool followed a push
manufacturing strategy. In this strategy the company produces as much inventory as it can and
then sends these to the distribution channels. In such a scenario all the plants operate to their
fullest. Obviously this may leads to lot of finished goods may remain locked for a longer period
in between consumer and distribution channels. Hence Whirlpool changed to pull
manufacturing system in 1997. This new system worked in the opposite way. Depending upon
the customers demand, manufacturing process starts.

Consumer
Supplier

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,
) ´uality control is defined as manufacturing requisite standards
in products and services. Most organizations such as Motorola, Sony etc. follow six sigma
quality control mechanisms. The main aim to enforce such stringent quality control
mechanisms is to reduce scraps at the end of the manufacturing processes. Six sigma basically
include ´uality control by: Acceptance sampling, statistical process control, using SEcV´UAL.
Many control charts are made depending upon the customer͛s tolerance levels. Whenever any
product goes outside the control limits, the quality control manager tries to find the assignable
cause of that incidence.

 
) This isanother very important for any consumer electronics company. Since
the demand for various models and product ranges depends upon lot of products, it is
sometimes difficult to estimate the somewhat correct value. Since the demand depends upon
technological factors, government regulations, trends etc. predicting demand is always a tough
task. For example Sony uses Demand Information creation system coupled with EcP to forecast
highly accurate demand trends. Both ´uantitative (Aggregate exponential smoothing) and
´ualitative (Delphi) methods are used in most organizations.


-
)Distribution is an important business process which links the supplier with the
real consumers. To maintain cost effective, fast and reliable distribution process is a must for
durable product manufacturer.Mostorganizations have a network of distributors to supply the
final goods directly to the retailers then to the final customers. The distributors are selected
based on their past experiences, financial stability and commitment. Since the company cannot
possibly perform the distribution task itself it has to hire such middlemen.

 
.: Most of the consumer electronic organizations like HP, Apple have
their own dedicated marketing and sales department. These departments work from collecting
consumer requirements to finally advertising the products. Generally 10% of the total revenue
is dedicated to advertising all products.




 
*(
) Today most organization do away with most business
processes in which they are not good at. Generally most consumer electronics organization
outsources customer service related processes. Countries like India, Malaysia, and Philippines
acts as the hub for BPO services to many organizations. The object of this strategy was to
reduce total manufacturing cost and provide higher manufacturing responsiveness to changes
in volume.

Healthcare
Processing

Typical
Financial
Data
business Customer
service
processing processes
outsourced

Hc-related
processing