Operational Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Operational Management - Essay Example For example, the researcher as part of the product designing division works range of consumer items like outerwear, Protective Fabrics, bike wear, fibre strings, running wear and filters and more than 50% of the revenue of the company comes from the above mentioned products (Gore, 2013a). Therefore, it can be surmised that the researcher as part of consumer product designing team put significant contribution in achieving top and bottom line growth for W L Gore & Associates. Before going to the main discussion, the essay will briefly describe the business operation of W L Gore & Associates. W L Gore & Associates W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc was established in 1958 by Genevieve (Vieve) Gore and Wilbert L. (Bill) (Gore, 2013b). The company is headquartered at Newark, Delaware while employee base of the company is more than 10,000. The company specializes in offering industrial products like fluoropolymer, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), versatile polymer etc which are being used for med ical implants, fabric laminates, signal transmission etc (Gore, 2013c). In case of consumer products, W. L. Gore & Associates offers fabrics and polymer items which can be used by customers for leisure activities, clothing and protective measures during adventure sports. As the research is working on consumer product designing division, therefore, the study will only focus on consumer items of W. L. Gore & Associates in order to address the research problems in focused and precise manner. Operations Tasks Consideration of the research works of Slack (2004) and Slack and Lewis (2008) reveals that marketing and operation management are closely related and both the aspects complement each other. According to Slack (2004) and Slack and Lewis (2008), marketing function works well when it comes to identifying the needs of customers but a firm needs to implement operational strategy in order to provide the required products or services and resources which can satisfy the need of identified need of customers. In case of W L Gore & Associates, four dimensions of operational strategy designed for offering consumer items like outerwear, Protective Fabrics, bike wear, fibre strings, running wear and filters can be defined in the following manner. Figure 1: Four Dimensions of Operational Strategy (Source: Slack and Lewis, 2008) In Top Down approach, top management of W L Gore & Associates suggests the product engineering team to design products which can fit functional strategy of the company, in Market Requirement, task of the operational team is to design items as per requirement of customers identified by marketing department of W L Gore & Associates, in Bottom up approach, operational team of W L Gore & Associates needs to optimize cost and resource allocation from their daily operational experience while working on product designing and in Operational Resource, operational team of W L Gore & Associates needs to conduct resource audit in order to understand existing fi nancial and non