Operation Management - Essay Example

The performance of a company includes both operational and financial aspects of a company and the characteristics of the five objectives of performance management are concerned with both the aspects. The operations strategies of a company primarily focus on meeting the expectations of its customers but it can also be used to identify strengths and weaknesses of a company. The companies make strategies to improve their identified weaknesses to be competitive in the market (Al-Darrab, 2000). The five characteristics of performance objectives The five characteristics of performance objectives are: Speed: it is concerned with the delivery of product or service by the company.

Quality: it is concerned with meeting the perceptions of the customers about the quality of the product or the service of the company. Cost: it is concerned with the price of the product or the service for the customers and the internal cost of production involved. Dependability: it is concerned with the stability of the processes involved in delivering products and services on time. Flexibility: it is concerned with the ability of the company in reacting towards the changes in demand and requirement of both – the customers and the business. . while external cost applies to price of the product to customers (Slack, 2010).

McDonald’s operations strategy and five characteristics of performance objectives Since 2001, many significant changes have been introduced in operations strategy of McDonald’s and it evolved primarily around four characteristics of performance objectives - speed, dependability, cost and quality. Though it cannot be said that the flexibility was ignored by the company, it was only less preferred. Externally, McDonald’s ensured fast delivery of its quality products at affordable cost to its customers and internally it made strategies to ensure a dependable delivery system, reducing labor and operation costs to make the products cost effective without compromising with the quality.

McDonald’s evaluates its performance in speed on the parameters such as the query time of customers, lead-time of orders, delivery- frequency and the time required for throughput. McDonald’s also ensures the dependability by evaluating its performance on the parameters such as number of orders not delivered on time, average deviation time from the scheduled arrival time, the ratio of stock of products and average time of late delivery of orders. The cycle time operations strategy of the company depends on efficient HR resources and it has ensured it by adhering to the principle ‘The result is done by a man”.

The company believes that strength of an organization depends on its human resources and the performance of the organization can only improve with the improved performance of its human resource (Bertrand and Fransoo, 2002). KFC’s operations strategy and five characteristics of performance objectives Being the largest chain of chicken