Case Selection and Process Identification

Objectives

This assignment helps you develop the skills to master the following course competencies:

o Develop innovative and sustainable solutions to strategic and global operations management challenges.

o Apply theories, models, and practices of global operations management to address business problems.

o Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.

Overview

In your assignments throughout this course, you will build an operations improvement plan (OIP) for a company of your choice that is facing, or recently faced, an operations challenge. If you have not already done so, take some time now to read all of the assignments for this course.

Each of the first five assignments represents a component of a typical OIP. For the Unit 6 assignment, you will improve, revise, and compile your work to deliver a finalized OIP, incorporating updates and focusing on the message you want to deliver to the organizational leaders at the company.

With this first assignment, you will choose your company and state the specific challenge it is facing. You will also need to identify two organizational processes that you believe would be worth addressing.

The assigned readings for this course are a starting point for your research, but it will be necessary for you to conduct further independent research on the subject in order to build your OIP. The Capella library is a recommended source of scholarly and professional information on the subject.

You are required to search information related to the industry of your selected company by using The Wall Street Journal. At least one case or article from The Wall Street Journal is required to be cited and listed in your reference section.

Guidelines for Choosing a Client Company

The organization you choose to research and to build your operations improvement plan for in this course will be referred to as your client company.

What type of company and challenge will suit your project in this course? Read the instructions for the Unit 6 assignment, Operations Improvement Plan, before selecting your client company.

Below are a few other guidelines for choosing a company that is likely to be successful for this project:

o You may choose any organization that offers some kind of products or services, as long as:

The organization is large and/or complex enough to require strategic operations management processes.

You can find sufficient information about the organization to fulfill the tasks outlined in the Unit 6 Operations Improvement Plan instructions.

If you choose an organization that you have worked for, or are personally connected to, be sure to follow the privacy guidelines of that organization. Contact your instructor if you have questions.

o Your client company should be facing a challenge that suits the objectives of the operations improvement plan.

o It may be easier to choose a client company in the mechanical or automotive industries, because they may be more similar to the corporations you will study in our required course readings. However, this is not a requirement

Instructions

For this assignment, complete the following. Your analyses should be as thorough as possible. Be sure to cite your resources for this information.

Identify a company and a challenge that warrant an operations improvement plan (OIP).

Using your preliminary research, identify at least two of your client company's existing organizational processes at the time of the problem that require operational improvement.

You will develop an OIP that would replace one or more of these processes. For this assignment, your task is to pick the processes best suited to your OIP.

Importance: What is the importance of the process to the organization?

Analyze the impact of the existing process on the organization, currently:

Scope: What is the scope of each process you intend to change? What is the breadth of its reach?

Parties involved: What customers, as well as internal and external suppliers, are affected by this process?

Priority: What is the timeliness or urgency for resolving the issues involved in this process?