Clean Water
Founded in the year 2010, clear water is one of the country’s leading producers of bottled water. The company manufactures 5 different brands of drinking water and predominantly sells to young individuals between the ages of 16-35 years. It operates 6 different bottling plants across the country and has a workforce of 200 employees. The company’s mission statement is, “to provide clean and affordable water to all.” The mission statement reflects the fact that access to clean water has become increasingly challenging for most people in the world as water becomes more expensive. The company’s vision is, “to be the world’s primary supplier of clean, affordable drinking water.” Clear water’s primary values include collaboration, accountability, quality, integrity and affordability. The company is able to attain the objectives proposed in its mission and vision statements through a lean operational system. This paper highlights the lean operational plan of Clear Water and demonstrates how it enables the company to attain its objectives.
The core of any effective operational plan is the basic planning process. The planning process refers to the steps that a company implements to develop its budgets and guide its future activities (Göleç, 2015). Some of the key areas covered by the planning process include operations, strategies, and tactics and company projects (Göleç, 2015). Operational plans are those that cover the company’s operations and are usually designed to reflect its mission and vision statements. Clear water has a 7 step planning process for its operational activities. The multi-tiered operational process is aimed at effectively distributing operational responsibilities across different managerial cadres. This serves to ensure that the company is able to meet one of its key goals of lean manufacturing thereby ensuring that the products can be sold at an affordable price.
The first tier in Clear Water’s operational plan is the objective development phase where the organization determines what it wishes to achieve in its operational process. This is an important phase as it sets the organizations long term goals which determine the nature of the operational process. The second phase of the operational planning process is the development of tasks to meet defined objectives. This is an essential phase of the process as it is where the management determines the tasks that need to be completed for the objective to be met. The third phase entails determining the resources that are required for the task. This is an essential operational phase as it determines resource distribution for the task. The other major phases of the organizations planning process are the creation of a timeline, identification of an assessment and tracking method, finalization of the plan and distribution of the plan to all involved in the process.
The objective development phase is usually handled by the company’s top-level management which consists of the president, vice president, board of directors and the CEO. These are the individuals who are responsible for setting the goals and vision of the organization. The development of tasks to meet organizational objectives, creation of a timeline, determination of resources required to implement defined tasks and finalization of the plan are responsibilities carried out by the organization’s mid-level management. They include the department managers, branch managers and the CEO. The lower-level management of Clear Water is responsible for overseeing the execution of the plan and distributing it to all personnel who are involved in the process.
The three most important elements of the operational planning process for Clean Water are quality, productivity and profitability. The elements are important to the company as they are in line with their mission statement and lean operational strategy. To facilitate increased customer acquisition and retention rates, the operational process of Clean Water should ensure product quality. As a result of this, all aspects of the production process for Clean Water’s products are geared towards facilitating the creation of high-quality products. One way through which operational process ensures the quality of the product is through a counter evaluation system where the quality of the product is reviewed at different cadres of the production process (King, & Zmud, 1981). The company also has a quality specialist whose responsibility is to review the quality of its products. Productivity is also an essential element of the planning process as it helps to increase revenue. A planning process that facilitates increased productivity leads to increased revenue for the company(King, & Zmud, 1981). Increased productivity is attained through increased efficiency of the planning process. To ensure increased efficiency, in the planning process it is imperative to reduce redundancies. The primary goal of any operational plan is to ensure a high level of profitability for the organization. Profitability is an essential element of the planning profit as it serves to evaluate its effectiveness (King, & Zmud, 1981). To enhance profitability, most operational planning process focuses on reducing the cost of operations while increasing profitability.
Human resource planning is an essential aspect of the operational plan as it facilitates the structuring of how personnel in the organization will be employed. This is crucial to make sure that each member of staff is employed to a task where he/she can operate at optimum levels. One of the key activities of human resource planning is analyzing the organization’s plans and objectives. This is an essential aspect of the planning process as it helps in evaluating whether the organization has personnel with the expertise required to meet its set objectives as per its operational strategy. The activity relates to Clean Water strategy of lean operations as it helps to ensure that tasks and responsibilities are matched to employees based on their abilities thereby limiting the risk of wastage and ensuring operational efficiency. Another major aspect of human resource planning is monitoring and controlling. The human resource personnel evaluate and control the operational plan to determine whether its objectives are met. This is essential as it helps in revising the plan and ensuring that organizational resources are effectively implemented thus reducing wastage and redundancies in processes.
To facilitate the effectiveness of the lean operations strategy, it is imperative that the organization employs a democratic management philosophy. Under the philosophy of democratic management, managers at the organizations make decisions with input from employees (Gould, 2002). Democratic management allows for two-way communications between staff from different cadres and these facilitate efficiency in the flow of information (Gould, 2002). It also allows employees to contribute to the decision-making process hence making them feel like valued members of the company. This serves to enhance their work experience and in doing so increase their level of productivity. Having employees feel like part of the organization’s decision making organ also motivates them to work harder as they start to view themselves as owners of the organizations and not just workers (Huang et al., 2016).
To ensure the efficiency of operations, Clean Water will have a five-tiered control process. The first step in the control process is the establishment of standards. This is where performance targets are set for the organization. The control type used for this step is to feedforward control which is used in detecting and anticipating challenges before a task is executed (Flamholtz, 1996). The second step is the determination of performance measurements which focuses on setting systems to measure the organization’s performance as per the set standards. The best control measure for this step is the concurrent control as it allows for the evaluation of systems as they occur (Flamholtz, 1996). The third step is measuring performance with the aim of increasing it. This step is also executed under concurrent control as it requires evaluation of systems and readjusting them as the task continues. The third control process is the comparing of organization’s performance standards and analyzing the deviations. The most effective control tool for this process is feedback control which focuses on completed tasks (Flamholtz, 1996). The last control step is taking corrective action of the operational process is necessary. This being the final aspect of the process is usually carried out after most tasks are completed and hence the most effective tool is feedback control.