Operation Management: Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK Limited

OPERATION MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK Limited (NMUK) (located in Sunderland) is known to be the largest and the most efficient car manufacturing plant in the UK. It is one of the largest companies, because of its high production levels and Number of employees working for the company. Nissan has used numerous improvement initiatives to continually improve quality, productivity and sustainability. The improvement techniques adopted by Nissan are Just In Time (JIT), Total Quality Management (TQM), The following essay will be discussing how all of these techniques helped Nissan to achieve business excellence and continues growth, and how well Nissan implemented and Integrated all of these techniques into the company’s process (McSweeney, 2017).

BODY

Operation Process

The operations process refers to the process starting from analyzing customer needs and hauls at the stage where the need is transformed into a product to satisfy customer needs, which meets or exceeds customer’s requirement and quality expectation. This is a strategy which focuses on customer needs and requirements. NMUK is among the first ones introducing these strategies to their processes to help meet and exceed the needs of the target customers. NMUK’s focus had been fixed on the customers since the start, Nissan's Mission and Purpose further describe Nissan's concept of business, "As a company worthy of trust, Nissan provides unique and innovative automotive products and services that deliver superior measurable values to all stakeholders”. Further, Nissan has invested over £2.1 billion in the Sunderland site to automate and introduce new technology to the plant; all these changes have been brought to reduce the cost and increase in the production capacity to support Nissan in achieving Cost leadership (Sinyavski et.al. 2019).

The Key elements of Nissan’s Management are:

Strategy and Planning

It is one of the most important elements of any business to strategize and plan the work, so that the resources can be better utilized and the wastage can be minimized, the strategy and planning step is necessary as without planning any company would be leading blindly, the strategy helps and directs operations managers in the direction to achieve company's strategic goals and vision. Nissan’s Business strategy includes cost leadership; as a result, Nissan's main focus is on providing budgeted cars, so that more people can afford it. These Strategies affect the long term position of the company in the Industry. Nissan is the lowest cost manufacturer in the industry due to which it enjoys a strategic advantage over other companies. Nissan’s Sunderland plant is technically highly advanced, which has automated repetitive tasks to achieve efficiency and remove human error. Machines can detect and eliminate the errors from a complex process, which might be considered as the bottleneck in the process (Barkhordari and Denavi, 2017).

Quality

Although cost leadership focuses on manufacturing the product at the lowest cost possible, it doesn't compromise with the quality of the product, Quality, Speed, and Cost are most important factors which could make or break a company. Nissan is on continues searching for better ways to provide quality and reduce cost at the same time, as it focuses on the various methods like TQM, which induces the quality focus in the process itself (Fening et al. 2017).

Total Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a tool used by the company to induce quality focus into the processes, TQM helps to detect and reducing or eliminating errors in manufacturing, streamlining supply chain management, improving customer experience and ensuring employees are up to speed with training. It is one of the key elements of Nissan's strategy, Involving customer satisfaction as the most important factor (Fening et al. 2017). TQM is a technique for continues improvement in organizational processes through continuously improving internal practices, TQM is a technique which not only focuses on the result, it focuses on bringing revolutionary changes in the current practices. A company can’t achieve success just by planning and strategizing, Implementation is as important as planning and making strategies, a company may survive without proper implementation of a plan but it wouldn’t be able to thrive, opting TQM brings several benefits to the Nissan, like it increased the awareness of quality culture within the organization, it emphasized teamwork, it made all the departments responsible for quality instead of forming a quality department and making it responsible for the quality. TQM helped Nissan to bring change in the thinking of employees and educating them to find better ways of performing a task (Fening et.al. 2017).

Just In Time

It was the process introduced by Japanese, post-World War-II era, Japanese lacked economic resources after the World War-II, to survive they built smaller factories to process and turn the small amount of Raw Material into Manufactured finished product, therefore to lower costs they identified a need to trim or lean out their manufacturing processes to reduce extra costs and save time, this system was later adopted by huge companies, we know as Toyota and Nissan, they introduced advanced technologies to optimize and automate the repetitive processes which involved a lot of human time and costs (McSweeney, 2017).

The Processes which often proved to be the bottleneck can be automated and made efficient, Nissan adopted Just-In-Time concept to reduce and such extra costs and reduction in flow times within production systems. The Nissan’s Machinery involves a transponder attached to the chassis of the vehicle, which includes all the information regarding the production of the vehicle, the vehicle is monitored at every stage of production through the use of sensors at various points, detecting and monitoring all the requirements, A message is sent by the transponder to the supplying company, which produces and provides the required item with the specifications communicated (Barkhordari and Denavi, 2017).

CONCLUSION

Thus, it can be summarized that Nissan’s Production way involves two never-ending processes which include Never-ending synchronization with the customers that involves synchronization of Quality (High-quality product), Cost (eliminating wastes), and Time (Reduction in lead-time and delivery time). Nissan uses a term Douki-seisan for sequenced and synchronized production; this concept helps Nissan in cutting out the lead time and costs throughout the supply chain. It also reduces the cost of storage and handling of inventory. Another process is never-ending quest to improve by identifying and solving problems that involves identifying and comparing the current and desired manufacturing state, and then reducing the gaps between them to improve. The above essay emphasized on the operation process used by Nissan motors and also different approaches to operation management used by the organization were determined in the essay.

REFERENCES

Barkhordari, R. and Denavi, H., 2017. Just-In-Time (JIT) Manufacturing and its Effect on the Competence of Supply Chain and Organizational Performance in the Tile and Ceramic Industry in Yazd Province. Specialty Journal of Knowledge Management, 2(1), pp.8-19.

Fening, F.A., Park, B. and Boatengokrah, E., 2017. TQM implementation concepts and tools/techniques. vol, 2, pp.13-24.

McSweeney, A.S., 2017. An exploratory investigation of the implementation of Lean in a UK automotive plant (Doctoral dissertation, University of Bradford).

Sinyavski, V.V., Shatrov, M.G., Dunin, A.Y., Shishlov, I.G. and Vakulenko, A.V., 2019, March. Results of simulation and experimental research of automobile gas diesel engine. In 2019 Systems of Signals Generating and Processing in the Field of on Board Communications (pp. 1-4). IEEE.