Week 2 Learning Team A Reflection
OPS/571
This week Learning Team A was responsible for researching a manufacturing organization and identifying the type of process design that is used to process that company’s orders. For the purposes of this reflection, the team chose to review General Motors. General Motors (GM) has several elements to the design and manufacturing process that the team found very interesting.
The Design Process
General Motors employs a design process that is more similar to the Hybrid process that combines both the make-to-order and make-to-stock design processes. In the Hybrid process the two design processes are parallel alternatives at the end of the GM automotive assembly process. In the most common hybrid form, a generic product is made and stocked at some point in the process. These generic units are then finished in a final process based on actual orders (Jacobs, 2010). General Motors take a simple approach to car production (see appendix A). The production process includes raw materials, suppliers, a supply chain assembly hub and dealer distributors (More, 2009).
One interesting part of the process is the use of suppliers in the assembly design. The dependency on suppliers poses a threat to the efficiency of the assembly process if suppliers are not able to provide the amount of parts needed, ability to accommodate specialty parts or provide their services in a timely manner. This can also be cumbersome on a global conglomerate like GM in its ability to consistently manufacture brands in different parts of the world.
The Manufacturing Process
An interesting factor in in the manufacturing process is that GM implemented a new way to track defective engines or engine components using and RFID system. This enables the organization to track and locate defective engines which could save lives the organization revenue in the long run. De Paula (2014), "GM has used RFID tags in its factories for more than 10 years...