1-Ans. Competitiveness is at the core of all strategies.

Even among them, priorities tend to bring the organisations focus on the areas to be dealt with in terms of allocation of resources people, money, and time. This means that different functional areas with their own capabilities and constraints have to be integrated for the overall corporate strategy. Flexible strategies and an adaptive production process help to achieve high productivity and also to satisfy the needs of customers, thereby improving the deliverables. For example, one hour paper printing and one hour screen printing services on the cover and same-day flex printing and binding services. Corporate strategy, functional area strategies, market analysis, competitive priorities, competitive capabilities, and new service/product design are the main operations strategies in any organisation. Operations strategy is formulated to leverage the advantages, absorb the consequences of the variable nature of various functions and provide a dependable implementation programme. As you can see, effective and timely communication is a vital factor to involve people at various stages and monitor the progress. Figure shows the links between the factors of operations management.

Formulation of a strategy depends on the following: Assessment of strengths Understanding of the weaknesses Nature of external environment Resilience of the internal environment

The policies derived from the operations strategy should be amenable to go along with other functions. Organisation strategy should be such that the strategies of different functions are designed to lend support to one another. Culture of the organisation should be established and nurtured in such a way, that, conflicts are resolved with the overall organisation strategy in view. Operations strategy takes under its umbrella the quality, time, and flexibility.

a) Quality: Quality is the driving factor for any organisation. When buying a product, a customer will always think about the value of the money he is investing. Even if the price of the product is high, the quality of the product will provoke the customer to buy it. b) Time: Time aspect considers that deliveries are made on time to meet customers expectations. Time taken to develop and market new products is becoming very critical in the global environment. c) Flexibility: Flexibility enables to meet the changing demands of customers, in order to develop new processes and materials and to make the organisation more agile in its manufacture.

2 Ans.(a) It takes a little more ingenuity to pin down the benefits. There are three main categories of benefit: Direct cost savings: savings in expenditure other than labour - print, paper, telephone, travel costs, etc. - that can be directly attributed to the introduction of the intranet. These can usually be calculated in three steps: (1) the number of incidences of expenditure in the time period, (2) the cost of each incidence and (3) the proportion of these that could be eliminated using the intranet. For example, if the number of pages of formal printed material received per person per year was 500, the cost in pence per page, including printing and delivery, was 6p and the percentage of these pages that could be delivered on-line was 70%, the saving in pounds would be 500 x (6 / 100) x 70% x the size of the population. 2 Ans.(b) Definition A plant layout study is an engineering study used to analyze different physical configurations for an industrial plant. Plant location refers to the choice of region and the selection of a particular site for setting up a business or factory. The selection of location is an important phenomenon for the success of an enterprise and requires thorough analysis.The location of a plant is an important entrepreneurial decision because it influences the cost of production and distribution to a great extent. In some cases, you will find that location may contribute to even 10% of cost of manufacturing and marketing. Therefore, an appropriate location is essential to the efficient and economical working of a plant. A firm may fail due to bad location or its growth and efficiency may be restricted. The selection of location is of paramount importance both for new and already established enterprises. For example: materials that are produced in bulk quantities, such as cement, mineral acids and fertilizers, where the cost of the product per ton is relatively low and the cost of transport is a significant fraction of the sales price, the plant should be located close to the primary market. 3. Ans. Line Balancing and Work Cell Balancing is an effective tool to increase the output of the Assembly line and Work Cell line to reduce manpower and cost. Assembly Line Balancing is nothing but the Simple Line Balancing is the calculation of assigning works to workstation alongside an Assembly Line and that operation will be optima in sense. Henry Ford who introduced the Assembly Line Balancing and in early times it was simple line balancing (LB) which has optimized the industrial importance, the effective difference between the optimal and sub-optimal operation can afford savings which will be million dollars every year. Line Balancing: it is a Classical Operation Research (OR) which optimizes the problem, and it has been handled by OR for many decades. Most of the algorithms have been proposed to this problem and it contempt the usual importance of the issue and the OR use to handle this. Its commercial software which is available to optimize the industry and their lines. Assembly Line Balancing is dependent on 3 models and it is described that these 3 kinds of models is related to Assembly Line Balancing and they are Single-Model Assembly lines, mixed models, and multi-model Assembly lines. Singe-Model Assembly Line: in early times assembly lines were used in high level production of a single product. But now the products will attract customers without any difference and allows the profitable utilization of Assembly Lines. Mixed Model Assembly Line: in this model the setup time between the models would be decreased sufficiently and enough to be ignored. So this internal mixed model determines the assembled on the same line. And the type of assembly line in which workers work in different models of a product in the same assembly line is called Mixed Assembly Line.

Multi-Model Assembly Line: in this model the uniformity of the assembled products and the production system is not that much sufficient to accept the enabling of the product and the production levels. To reduce the time and money this assembly is arranged in batches, and this allows the short term lot-sizing issues which made in groups of the models to batches and the result will be on the assembly levels. 4. Ans. TQM is viewed from many angles- as a philosophy, as an approach and journey towards excellence. The main thrust is to achieve customer satisfaction by involving everybody in the organisation- across all functions- with continuous improvement driving all activities. TQM systems are designed to prevent poor quality from occuring. The following Steps are implemented to achieve Total Quality. Customer-focused. The customer ultimately determines the level of quality. No matter what an organization does to foster quality improvementtraining employees, integrating quality into the design process, upgrading computers or software, or buying new measuring tools the customer determines whether the efforts were worthwhile. Total employee involvement. All employees participate in working toward common goals. Total employee commitment can only be obtained after fear has been driven from the workplace, when empowerment has occurred, and management has provided the proper environment. Process-centered. A fundamental part of TQM is a focus on process thinking. A process is a series of steps that take inputs from suppliers (internal or external) and transforms them into outputs that are delivered to customers (again, either internal or external). The steps required Integrated system. Although an organization may consist of many different functional specialties often organized into vertically structured departments, it is the horizontal processes interconnecting these functions that are the focus of TQM. Micro-processes add up to larger processes, and all processes aggregate into the business processes required for defining and implementing strategy. Everyone must understand the vision, mission, and guiding principles as well as the quality policies, objectives, and critical processes of the organization. Strategic and systematic approach. A critical part of the management of quality is the strategic and systematic approach to achieving an organizations vision, mission, and goals. Continual improvement. A major thrust of TQM is continual process improvement. Continual improvement drives an organization to be both analytical and creative in finding ways to become more competitive and more effective at meeting stakeholder expectations. Fact-based decision making. In order to know how well an organization is performing, data on performance measures are necessary. TQM requires that an organization continually collect and analyze data in order to improve decision making accuracy, achieve consensus, and allow prediction based on past history. Communications. During times of organizational change, as well as part of day-to-day operation, effective communications plays a large part in maintaining morale and in motivating employees at all levels.

5. (a)Ans. Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of the system and looks at the economies achieved during the processes. Every process will have a number of contributors which help in achieving maximum productivity. The processes are: People, Machines, Facilitating goods, Ancillary equipments, and Technology. Each of these elements attempts to enhance the contribution of other elements. Opportunities exist at all stages of the workflow in the entire system to introduce measures for increasing productivity. Communication, effective review processes and innovative methods will ensure optimisation of resources. Building up reliability into the equipments, managing the supply chain to economise on the cost factors improves productivity. Quality circles are very efficient in incorporating low cost and non-intrusive methods of improving productivity and quality throughout the organisation. Quality circles: Involve all persons who are actually involved in the production system and the information they elicit and bring about improvements that are highly cost effective. Unveil creativity and encourage team work and bring about improvements almost on a day to day basis. Bring continuous incremental changes in a harmonious way instead of dramatic changes Encourage identification of possible failures and seek methods of preventing things going wrong.

5.(b)Ans. Strategic planning consists of the process of developing strategies to reach a defined objective. As we label a piece of planning "strategic" we expect it to operate on the grand scale and to take in "the big picture" (in contradistinction to "tactical" planning, which by definition has to focus more on the tactics of individual detailed activities). "Long range" planning typically projects current activities and programs into a revised view of the external world, thereby describing results that will most likely occur (whether the planner wants them or not!) Strategic planning takes place primarily in military situations (see military strategy), in business activities and in government. Within business, strategic planning may provide overall direction (called strategic management) to a company or give specific direction in such areas as: Financial strategies Human resource/organizational development strategies Information technology deployments Marketing strategy Within government, strategic planning provides guidance for organizational management similar to that for business, but also provides guidance for the evolution or modification of public policy and laws. Areas of such public policy include: Functional plans such as for land use, transportation, and water resources Growth management and/or comprehensive planning.

6. Ans. Logical Process Modeling is the representation of putting together all the activities of business process in detail and making a representation of them. The initial data collected need to be arranged in a logical manner so that links are made between nodes for making the workflow smooth. The steps are : (a) Capturing relevant data in detail to be acted upon; (b) Establishing controls and limiting access to the data during process execution;(c) Determining as which task in the process to be done and subsequent tasks in that process; (d) Making sure that all relevant data are available for all the tasks that need to be in the order determined; (e) Making available the relevant and appropriate data for that task; (f) Establishing a mechanism to indicate acceptance of the results after every task or process to have the assurance that flow is going ahead with accomplishments in the desired path.Some of the activities may occur in sequential order whereas some of them may run parallel.There may be circular paths, like rework loops. Complexities arise out of the manner in which process activities are connected together. Logical Process Model consists only of the business activities and shows the connectivity among them. The process model is a representation of the business activities different from the technology dependent ones. Thus we have a model that is singularly structured only for business activities. Logical Process Model improves control on the access to data and identifies who is in possession of data at different nodes in the dataflow network that has been structured. A few of the logical modeling formats are given below a) Process Descriptions with task sequences and data addresses b) Flow Charts with various activities and relationships c) Flow Diagrams d) Function hierarchies e) Function dependency diagrams. Physical Modeling Physical modeling is concerned with the actual design of data base meeting the requirements of the business. Physical modeling deals with the conversion of the logical model described above into a relational model. Objects get defined at the schema level. The objects here are tables created on the basis of entities and attributes. Here the database is defined for the business. All the information is put together to make the database software specific. This means that the objects during physical modeling vary on the database software being used. The outcomes are server model diagrams showing tables and relationships with a database.