Refining the Problem Statement
This assignment helps you develop the skills to master the following course competencies:
Develop innovative and sustainable solutions to strategic and global operations management challenges.
Apply theories, models, and practices of global operations management to address business problems.
Integrate operations management analyses into general business management planning and decision making.
Communicate in a manner that is professional and consistent with expectations for members of the business professions.
Activity Instructions
You have examined and broadly identified the organizational problem you will address in your OIP and have begun to identify the new process you would propose to address it. The next critical step is to refine your problem statement by defining and demonstrating the problem and process in detail. There are a number of tools you can use to do this. Two of the most useful are the cause-and-effect diagram and the process flowchart.
For this assignment, complete the following:
Create a cause-and-effect diagram to identify, analyze, and graphically depict all potential causes related to the problem, in order to uncover its root causes.
Create a graphic flowchart that briefly details all of the steps you will need to implement in your new process, over time. Identify what this flowchart reveals about the following:
Previously unidentified yet important steps.
Products or services that should have been undergoing quality checks but were not.
Instances in the old process when critical information was not shared among all involved people and functions.
Create a before-and-after flowchart that illustrates the process that was used before your proposed improvements and what it might look like after your recommendations are incorporated.
Based on the preliminary problem statement you developed in Unit 2, briefly describe the scope of your process improvement objective. For this assignment, focus on only one of the contributing causes of the problem.
Write a refined version of your problem statement based on what you have learned about your objective by using the diagram and flowchart tools