Thursday, 20 September 2012

IGNOU MBA 2012 II semester MS-05 Solved Assignments

    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:
  1. Quality
  2. Appearance
  3. Performance
  4. Service life
  5. 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.
  1. 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:
  1. Organizational Factors
  2. Environmental Factors
  3. 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.
  1.  

No comments:

Post a Comment