IGNOU MBA 2012 II semester MS-05 Solved Assignments

1. 1. 2. How should an organization balance the different design characteristics in a new product? Elaborate.
   2. Characteristics of a Good Product Design Company
   Creating an attractive and apt product design is a primary concern for manufacturers who want to ensure high-end functionality, great features, user-friendliness and safety of a product. It is in this context that the importance of a product design company comes into the picture. A good product design company uses the best quality components and materials to design optimum quality products. Additionally, the production process is also well streamlined and controlled in order to ensure a seamless product design service. Plastic is undoubtedly one of the most commonly used materials in the product design service industry. Due to its high flexibility, it sis used extensively across a wide range of sectors including computers, cars, aircrafts, toys, household electrical items, and mobile phones.  In fact, plastic product design and product design consultancy have now become specialised areas of service.
   There are several methods of plastic production that are employed extensively by a product design company in creating A-grade plastic product design options. Some of these methods include rapid injection moulding, conventional injection moulding, rapid prototyping, and rapid tooling. Due to their extreme technical nature, these methods call for a lot of attention, safe practices and quality check to be employed by a product design company. Typically, a product design company that specialises in plastic product design develops a tool kit for the purpose and uses a technology that best suits the requirements of a plastic product design project.
   Let us now discuss the characteristics of a good product design company, some of which are elucidated below:
   
2. Quality
3. Appearance
4. Performance
5. Service life
6. Price 
   

A good product design company must ensure that all its plastic product design solutions are of best quality. Post the design and manufacturing process, it is mandatory for a good product design company to ensure that all the products go through a strict quality check in order to ensure zero errors. The appearance of a product is another area that calls for special attention from a product design consultancy. Any company offering this service must have a pool of professionals who are experts in plastic product design and can create innovative and user friendly products to meet the specific requirements of their clients. The job of a product design service is to further ensure that the products designed and manufactured by it rates high on performance and will last long too. Lastly, the product pricing is the most important area that a good product design company must look into. It must offer its product design service at competitive rates that can be afforded by all.

3. 3. Define Job Design. Explain the important factors to be considered for Job designing.

A) Job design follows job analysis i.e. it is the next step after job analysis. It aims at outlining and organising tasks, duties and responsibilities into a single unit of work for the achievement of certain objectives. It also outlines the methods and relationships that are essential for the success of a certain job. In simpler terms it refers to the what, how much, how many and the order of the tasks for a job/s.
Job design essentially involves integrating job responsibilities or content and certain qualifications that are required to perform the same. It outlines the job responsibilities very clearly and also helps in attracting the right candidates to the right job. Further it also makes the job look interesting and specialised.

Factors to be considered for Job designing: A well defined job will make the job interesting and satisfying for the employee. The result is increased performance and productivity. If a job fails to appear compelling or interesting and leads to employee dissatisfaction, it means the job has to be redesigned based upon the feedback from the employees. Broadly speaking the various factors that affect a job design can classified under three heads. They are: Organizational Factors Environmental Factors Behavioural Factors Organizational Factors

Organizational factors that affect job design can be work nature or characteristics, work flow, organizational practices and ergonomics.

• Work Nature: There are various elements of a job and job design is required to classify various tasks into a job or a coherent set of jobs. The various tasks may be planning, executing, monitoring, controlling etc and all these are to be taken into consideration while designing a job.
• Ergonomics: Ergonomics aims at designing jobs in such a way that the physical abilities and individual traits of employees are taken into consideration so as to ensure efficiency and productivity.
• Workflow: Product and service type often determines the sequence of work flow. A balance is required between various product or service processes and a job design ensures this.
• Culture: Organizational culture determines the way tasks are carried out at the work places. Practices are methods or standards laid out for carrying out a certain task. These practices often affect the job design especially when the practices are not aligned to the interests of the unions.

  • Environmental Factors

Environmental factors affect the job design to a considerable extent. These factors include both the internal as well as external factors. They include factors like employee skills and abilities, their availability, and their socio economic and cultural prospects.

• Employee availability and abilities: Employee skills, abilities and time of availability play a crucial role while designing of the jobs. The above mentioned factors of employees who will actually perform the job are taken into consideration. Designing a job that is more demanding and above their skill set will lead to decreased productivity and employee satisfaction.
• Socio economic and cultural expectations: Jobs are nowadays becoming more employee centered rather than process centered. They are therefore designed keeping the employees into consideration. In addition the literacy level among the employees is also on the rise. They now demand jobs that are to their liking and competency and which they can perform the best.

  • Behavioural Factors

Behavioural factors or human factors are those that pertain to the human need and that need to be satisfied for ensuring productivity at workplace. They include the elements like autonomy, diversity, feedback etc. A brief explanation of some is given below:

• Autonomy: Employees should work in an open environment rather than one that contains fear. It promotes creativity, independence and leads to increased efficiency.
• Feedback: Feedback should be an integral part of work. Each employee should receive proper feedback about his work performance.
• Diversity: Repetitive jobs often make work monotonous which leads to boredom. A job should carry sufficient diversity and variety so that it remains as interesting with every passing day. Job variety / diversity should be given due importance while designing a job.
• Use of Skills and abilities: Jobs should be employee rather than process centered. Though due emphasis needs to be given to the latter but jobs should be designed in a manner such that an employee is able to make full use of his abilities and perform the job effectively.
  

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IGNOU MBA 2012 II semester MS-05 Assignments

1. Explain the concept of Systems Life-Cycle
   
   
   1. Introduction
   Every organization has an objective or objectives and goals to achieve. These objectives and goals achieving can be possible only when management organizing the available recourses in a suitable structure with a plan. The whole process of achieving objectives like planning, organizing and implementation and correction process by means of feedback bring together by operation management. The physical resources like space, machinery, money and men who organize those physical will take major role in the operation management.
   The objectives related to both performance and cost, decision making process related production or operation of the organization, strategic and operational and feedback control system will play important role in deciding life cycle of any organization. The various stages and their life span each stage life cycle of system is discussed in the next section.
   2. Life cycle concept
   Life cycle concept is applied in operational management for any production system which takes input and produces some out put by using some process. The production system may be mass production, batch production, Job shop production or unit manufacture or project. The different production system is applicable to process of production depends on the type of product we produce and the volume of the process we use to produce the goods. The whole process of operation form birth to death of a production system can be viewed as definite Life cycle.
   The life cycle concept of any product is similar to any life cycle of a living being. The major stages in the life cycle concept are 1) Development 2) Introduction or Birth 3) Growth 4) Maturity 5) Decline or Death. The similar Life cycle concept we can apply to any product in production system. The Typical product Life- cycle is represented in Figure A1-1. The concept also shows the product life influenced by the external environment and go through the various stages in its life cycle. Through out the cycle the whole process of operation management is applied on the production system to maintain to sustain longer. The in evitable situation due to the environmental influences like people taste, interest there is always new born of other production system. The same concept is shown in the Figure A1-1 Product A and Product B. product B emerged in the market when the Product enjoying the maturity stage of its life cycle.
   Birth
   Growth
   Maturity
   Death
   Product A
   Product B
   Volume
   Time
   

   Figure A1-1 Product Life Cycle Concept

   The life span of each stage of a product may vary from a few months to years. For an example, within no time some products reach growth stage as soon as they were introduced in the market. Now we will discuss about each stage of the product life cycle.
   2.1 Development
   The development stage can be a protracted stage and will involve activities such as design, planning, costing, test marketing, etc. The costs are high, with no earned revenue (and thus it does not register as a stage on the diagram at Figure A1-1). Promotion for awareness may commence in advance of introduction of the product to the marketplace.
   2.2 Birth (or Introduction stage)
   This is the stage where a product will be introduced after initial decisions like selection, technology selection, location and layout design of production facility after study of various aspects of business unit in transpiration and raw material, manpower resources availability etc. This is the stage we call it as Birth stage of the product.
   2.3 Growth stage
   After introducing the product the next stage for any product is looking for growth. The growth is stage is very critical in the operation management. The key of success is lying in this stage. How we take this product to people or how people will have the feel of necessity of the product depends on the efficient marketing strategies of the management. Sometimes the time taking to reach to growth stage will be faster because of the uniqueness of its usage when compared with its competitor's products. Major efforts are required at this stage to push with all possible strategies in an ethical manner.
   2.4 Maturity stage
   Once the product is established, the product life cycle enters into the maturity stage. At this stage organization takes feedback from various groups of users and improve the product usability with add on features and introduce different models without changing the basic applications. This is the stage where businesses will be exposed more to the external competitive market which initiates the new comers with similar products where they will take off the market or share the market which causes the original product business organization will go for further improvements or for a new product line. Sustainability of this stage depends on the factors like the management's views, how fast they recognize their product obsolesced and how fast new comers takes over the market.
   2.5 Death stage.
   As discussed above in maturity stage, in case business management could not predict the impact of the new product growth and lack of taking necessary changes in the product design, the product life cycle enters into the decline or death stage, which leads to the organization merging with new companies or liquidation or sale.
   3. Life-cycle costing
   The cost of the product throughout the product life cycle is referred to as the Life cycle costing. The new concept of this Life cycle costing is long-term cost. The short-term cost always lead us to inefficient decisions which put us in a wrong track of product selection, design and production. The initial cost may be higher at growth stage, but if we know that the product sustains longer in the market in future, we should go ahead with considerable investments keeping the future market in mind. The decision policy throughout the life cycle should be maintained in the operational management of such business opportunity.
   4. Conclusion
   As we discussed in the above section, any business organization will have their product life cycles. The operation management of the organization should always keep watching the new trends of people's taste or requirements, the available latest technology and competitor's new proposals so that necessary actions can be taken in advance to decrease the growth stage and increase the span of the maturity stage. The type of operational decisions and selection procedures all depends on the product of any organization plans to develop or introduce into the market.
   
   
   
   

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