Chris Mehlo Case

Chris Mehlo

1. Executive Summary

In today's highly competitive market, pressures for organizations to meet multiple often inconsistent and contextual demands arise. The traditional approaches to managing operations in manufacturing are no longer sufficient to meet the difficult challenge of continuously achieving and improving manufacturing excellence.

Leading companies are turning to a broader type of solution to enable manufacturing transformation - one that encompasses not just the plant floor, but also the warehouse, quality and material flow throughout the production process and product supply network. Manufacturers transform their operations by automating, executing and managing the performance of business processes across the value chain. This means integration of processes spanning supply chain, production, maintenance, distribution, quality and labour operations.

This report will try to address manufacturing excellence which can be achieved by streamlining operations on the RIO Bravo IV plant floor and throughout the supply chain. This will focus on the implementation of Operations Management processes in order to achieve and sustain manufacturing excellence

2. Problems Identification

2.1 Organizational Strategy

Organizational strategy plays a pivotal role in organization design. According to Ritson (2000), the productive technologies and techniques employed, the organization's dependence upon itself for its inputs, organizational size, and the stability of the organization's operating environment all appear to play a significant part.

In this case, the executives might have set corporate goals and objectives for the parent company. However, there seems to be no clearly defined corporate strategy; goals, strategic path and alignment for the RIO Bravo IV plant. This may be partly due to some of the challenges inherent with strategy development and implementation, where the implementation of strategy is left to functional managers (Steyn & Schmikl, 2010a). In this scenario, high levels of co-ordination and strategy implementation are necessary to ensure that managers blend agility with direction, creativity with control, and flexibility with structure (Partington, 2000). The evidence of lack of a well thought growth strategy is shown by the growth decision made solely on the basis showcasing ability to manufacture quality products in a foreign country.

2.2 Organizational Structure & Culture

Organizations modify or change their culture due to a change in strategy. Thus, effective leaders change strategies and cultures to make their firms more competitive despite the natural tendency of cultures to resist change (Kotter & Heskett, 1992: 89). The greater the degree of change required, the more befitting it is to re-look at the existing culture to predict whether it will be a catalyst in moving ahead or whether it will act as an impeding factor defending the status