ISCOM 370 Week 3 Manufacturing and Service Operations Example

Building the Sofa and Bringing It Home: Comparing Manufacturing and Service Operations at a Furniture Maker

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

ISCOM/370: Strategic Supply Chain Management

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Catawba Ridge Furniture, its plant, delivery service and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Catawba Ridge Furniture, the composite western North Carolina upholstery maker studied in earlier weeks, is usually described as a manufacturer. Yet much of what its online and designer customers experience is a service: a two-person crew carrying a sofa into the living room, unwrapping it, setting it up and taking the packaging away, and later, for some, a repair visit. The plant earns praise from retailers; the delivery service earns most of the company's complaints. This paper compares the two operations and asks whether the service is being managed like a factory.

The Plant

The upholstery plant builds about 1,100 pieces a week. Core styles move through a line flow: frames are built in batches, foam is cut by machine, fabric is cut on automated tables and pieces move through sewing, upholstery and inspection stations at a steady pace. Custom orders, after the Week 1 changes, go to a cell of four teams who build each piece from start to finish. Finished goods can wait in the warehouse, so the plant can schedule a level load each week regardless of daily orders. Quality is checked at three inspection points against written standards for seams, fit and frame strength.

The Delivery and Repair Service

The service runs 18 two-person crews from the plant and two hubs in Atlanta and Charlotte, completing about 900 home deliveries and 120 repair visits a week. Customers must be home, deliveries cannot be stored and a crew's day can unravel when one customer has a narrow staircase or a missing payment. Satisfaction surveys average 3.4 of 5, against 4.4 for the furniture itself.

Process Choice

Hayes and Wheelwright (1979) linked manufacturing process choice to the product life cycle in a product-process matrix: job shops suit low-volume, high-variety products; line flows suit higher-volume, standard products. The plant fits the matrix well: line flow for core styles, a cell for custom ones. Services need a different lens. Chase (1978) argued that the efficiency of a service depends on how much of it requires customer contact. High-contact operations must accommodate customers' timing and needs and cannot run as smoothly as back-office work. Home delivery is the highest-contact work the company does.

Customer Participation

Sampson and Froehle (2006) proposed that what defines a service process is that customers provide inputs, themselves, their belongings or their information, which makes services more variable than manufacturing. At Catawba Ridge, customers provide the home, the access, the timing and sometimes the old sofa to haul away. Each is a source of variation the plant never faces: 14 percent of deliveries fail on the first attempt because no one is home, the piece will not fit through a doorway or the customer has not cleared space.

The plant controls its inputs; the delivery crew walks into the customer's house and inherits everything about it.

Capacity and Demand

The plant uses inventory to separate production from demand. The service cannot. Delivery demand peaks on Saturdays and in the weeks before holidays, and repair demand rises after holiday sales. Today the service plans crews the way the plant plans lines, a level number every day, so Saturday slots sell out three weeks ahead while weekday crews run half-empty routes. Services handle peaks by shifting demand, through pricing or appointment windows, and by flexing capacity, through part-time crews and cross-training.

Quality

Plant quality is measured by defects found at inspection and returns, about 1.8 percent. Service quality depends on the customer's view. Parasuraman et al. (1988) built a survey around five aspects of service that customers weigh: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles. Survey comments at Catawba Ridge fall mainly on reliability, crews arriving outside the promised day, and responsiveness, slow answers when customers call. The service measures only deliveries completed per crew per day, a factory measure that ignores both.

Where the Service Borrows the Wrong Habits

Three plant habits do not fit the service. First, routes are optimized to fill trucks and minimize miles, which leaves customers with all-day windows. Second, crew productivity is measured by stops per day, which rewards rushing set-up and skipping explanations. Third, problems are handled after the fact by a call center far from the crews, as defects would be handled after inspection. Each makes sense in a plant and frustrates a customer.

What the Crews Say

Interviews with six crew leaders added detail the data missed. Crews receive their route sheets at 6 a.m. with no notes on access, so they learn about stairs, elevators and narrow halls only at the door. When a delivery fails, the crew must call the office and wait for instructions, losing up to an hour. Several leaders said they would gladly call customers the night before if the company allowed it. These comments point to a common service problem: the people closest to the customer have the least information and the least authority.

Recommendations

Four-hour delivery windows chosen by customers at checkout, with a text the evening before and a 30-minute call ahead.

A pre-delivery checklist sent with the confirmation, covering door widths, stairs and clearing space, aimed at cutting first-attempt failures from 14 to 7 percent.

Saturday pricing: a $49 premium for Saturday slots, with weekday delivery free, to shift some demand.

Six part-time crews for peaks, trained by senior crews.

Crew measures that include on-time arrival and a two-question customer rating, alongside stops per day.

Plant improvements: keep the line and cell, and add a final photo record of each piece before loading to settle damage claims.

Measures

For the plant: defect rate, returns and schedule attainment. For the service: on-time arrival within the window, first-attempt success, customer rating and cost per delivery. Results will be reviewed monthly, with crew leaders present.

Conclusion

Catawba Ridge runs a well-designed plant and a service managed with plant habits. The plant's inventory, controlled inputs and inspection points let it optimize for efficiency. The delivery service has customers in the process, perishable capacity and quality judged by experience. Managing it as a high-contact service, with windows, preparation, demand shaping and customer measures, should close the gap between how customers rate the sofa and how they rate getting it home.

References

Chase, R. B. (1978). Where does the customer fit in a service operation? Harvard Business Review, 56(6), 137-142.

Hayes, R. H., & Wheelwright, S. C. (1979). Link manufacturing process and product life cycles. Harvard Business Review, 57(1), 133-140.

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64(1), 12-40.

Sampson, S. E., & Froehle, C. M. (2006). Foundations and implications of a proposed unified services theory. Production and Operations Management, 15(2), 329-343. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1937-5956.2006.tb00248.x