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Nokia: The Leading Manufacturer Of Mobiles

Paper Type: Free Essay Subject: Marketing
Wordcount: 2638 words Published: 21st Apr 2017

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Operations Management focuses on cautiously managing the procedure to produce and distribute the products and services. Major activities include product creation, development, production and distribution. Other related activities are managing the purchases, controlling of inventory, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluation of the procedures. Operations management focuses on the effectiveness and efficiency of the procedures. Therefore operational management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes. Ultimately the nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of the products and services in the organization.

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What is Quality

Quality is a degree of excellence that is possessed by products or services & it is measured or compared in terms of different characteristics like performance, reliability or physical appearance etc. Due to globalization & the intense competition, companies have progressively started to focus on strategic importance of quality in operations management. Quality is a feature used for measuring the extent of satisfaction that is provided in order to meet the expectations & needs of customers.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

TQM is a set of management practices throughout the organization, geared to ensure that the organization is consistently meets or surpasses customer requirements. TQM places strong focus on process measurement and controls as to ensure continuous improvement in the products and services.

About Nokia

Nokia Corporation is the leading manufacturer of mobile devices and a leader in the converging Internet and communications industries. It offers its products in 150 countries across the world and employs about 68,500 people. According to www.reuters.com, during the year ended December 31, 2008, the company shipped a total of 468 million mobile devices.

Nokia is the world leader toady and is still the number one manufacturer of cell phones, and among the leading makers of mobile networks. Nokia is commited to connecting people. Nokia is engaged in combining advance technology with the services. Every new day more than 1.2 Billion people connect each other through Nokia device- from mobile phones to advance smartphones and high performance mobile computers. Nokia is integrating its devices with Innovation Services through ovi, which includes maps, music, apps, emails etc. Major Products of Nokia are:

Mobile Phones

Online Services

Software Solutions

Security Solutions

Mini Laptops

Accessories

In 2008 Nokia’s brand was voted the fifth best brand by Business Week magazine with the brand value of $35,942 (as compared to $33,697 in 2007 – a 7% change) after Coca-cola, IBM, Microsoft, and GE. On April 16, 2009, Nokia announced its results for the first quarter for 2009. According to the Interim Report, sales are stabilizing and company is regaining the initiative in smartphones.

Quality at Nokia

Nokia since its inception and presence in the market is known for the best mobile phones and accessories manufacturers, and this is because of the high standard and quality controls. If we see the position of Nokia today, we will come to know that still it has number one position among the mobile phone manufacturer, and one of the leading makers of mobile networks.

Nokia is engaged to total customer satisfaction and improve its applications and products day by day, by making them user friendly. Since Nokia started its operations and offer its products keeping in mind the lay man that can easily use their product. The main vision of Nokia is “Connecting People”, is now connecting people to what matters, Nokia is needed to help make the world a better place for everyone.

At Nokia, proactive approach is used while considering the impact of their activities on environment is considered. Product is created on life cycle thinking, i.e. minimizing the impact of environment on the life of their products. While during the product creation activity main focus is on the energy efficiency, sustainable use of material, smart packaging and creating environmental services that involve people to more sustainable lifestyles. They have enhanced the energy efficiency of our products.

Packaging is important aspect of quality at Nokia for their products as they are make to protect the products form the factory to the customers. Nokia is responsible to work for minimize the impact of environment by the use of substantial materials, by reducing the packaging size by reduced use of material.

Nokia have a dedicated team that is responsible for managing the operations of Nokia. The Chairman and the members of the team are appointed by the Board of Directors of Nokia. Nokia’s approach is to continuously improve the environmental sustainability for all their products and services. Therefore Nokia focuses on the maintainable innovations across their product range.

Their quality standards include using approved, already tested and considerable material in their products. Improve the energy efficiency of their devices, applications and enhancements including chargers. Developing smart compact packaging , and engaging people via eco software.

At Nokia, research & development teams and design teams creates concepts that challenge conventional practices and spark innovations. They make use of recycled and innovative eco materials to create concept devices that could perhaps one day be manufactured or inspire future product features.

Business Strategy at Nokia

The overall business strategy of Nokia Corporation is to strengthen its international status in the market as a tp be the leader in network system and to be the biggest supplier of its products. As part of the company’s goal is to strengthen consumer satisfaction and introduce new changes in technology in order to allow people to have easy and instant access to mobile world, internet etc.

About Motorola

Motorola is well known organization in the field of telecom which has introduced range of telecomm product in the world, this organization has employed more than 90,000 people worldwide along with 50+ major facilities. Motorola is an American based telecom company having an enormous telecom product portfolio worldwide. These products can be classified into following categories:

Mobile equipment

Wireless Telecomm equipment

Semiconductors

Defence and Aerospace equipment and application

Data communication

Automotive and industrial equipment (such as GPRS and other communication devices)

Quality at Motorola

In the early 80’s Motorola has started its operations related to quality improvement, this process has created a benchmark by Motorola for its competitors regarding products and service in the telecom sector. As it has been mentioned earlier that approach used for quality improvement in the early 80’s was very much successful and now many product and service offered by Motorola are considered to be best in the world. Management of Motorola Corp. has shared a quality vision which simply stated as: “Zero Defect in Everything we Do”. This statement has encouraged managers to align this vision with the corporate vision which is to provide “total customer satisfaction”. In order to act like a customer all the corporate executive and managers were restricted to use Motorola product; including pagers and cell phone to experience the level of satisfaction from the customer perspective.

Motorola use some of the key approaches from the TQM perspective; the major approach was use by the Motorola was six-sigma quality and improve just in time. Six-sigma is statistical concept used in total quality management that used an interpretation between the defected products and customer feedback that has been received for those related product. This concept has also help Motorola to improve the production cycle as well which include overall system including designing, manufacturing, administration and marketing.

Employees were allowed to participate in different product development and quality improvement related activities. This program was classified as “Motorola Participative Management Program” (PMP) in this program team or group associated to same product or service is required to meet in order to analyze the progress toward the quality goal, solve various related problem and identify new products.

To reward high quality of work; different stories and recommendation are shared by other teams. Various rewards and bonuses have been awarded to employee participated in PMP. About 30 percent of workers are assigned for different quality matters, ranging from identifying basic quality guideline to designing of productivity.

*Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award 1988 Winner Motorola Inc. 2002, Balbridge National Quality Program.

Quality Implications

Operation management the name by itself explains that it has to deals with the operations of the organization on daily, basis maintaining the core function of efficiency in the organization and the problem that might be occur during the operation process, this comes under the umbrella of management and their capabilities that how efficient they are in order to solve those problem without making any hindrance in the whole operation process of the firm.

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For me I believe that standardization is the main essence for TQM, it allow organizations and their management to improve the quality whether it is a product, service or those procedure which have been implemented within the organizations. TQM allows the management to set a quality level within the organization. This approach can be use from different perspectives and quality tool it will help to hone operation management skills in an organization in context of quality improvement in product and service.

But after analyzing all the theories and method related to TQM its could be suggested that management of an organization should adopt different approaches to improve the quality of service like it has been mentioned earlier that all the business process should be standardized and this is actually Motorola, British telecom, McDonald are doing in their organization. These organizations have created a benchmark in the field of operation management which has leaded them to create exemplary model for other competitors in term of quality and customer satisfaction.

According to my opinion operation management is vast subject and one theory or philosophy couldn’t sum the whole topic but however, critical analysis can be made on the basis of the theory and topic that have been discussed in this assignment. Kanji has termed the quality management in context of operation management as Industrial revolution (1990: 4). Past researches have claimed that the quality would increase the level of competition as well the performance of an organization (Das et al., 2000, Douglas and Judge, 2001; Kaynak, 2003). I agree with this concept, hence it was stated by Taguchi in his theory related to quality and performance of the organization.

According to Margolies he further argues that high quality product/service will not only acclaimed the customer satisfaction but also tries to sustain the long term profitability for an organization [Margolies (1988)]. IT has been analyzed by the case studies that product and service correlate with each other; effective product with poor performance might destroy the potential customer base.

Recommendations

These are some recommendations suggested to the management of the “Motorola Corp” which will definitely help them to improve production process, quality of the product and most important overall operation management process, which will ultimately increase the number of customer and increase the profitability of the firm.

Nokia needs to pay closer attention to its smartphones portfolio: 5800 is Nokia’s first fairly successful product in the converged cell phones market. In order to leverage its position, Nokia would need to invest a lot in R&D and marketing.

As far as my opinion is concerned, I believe that the company’s business strategy is well organized and successfully applied since it is perpetually thriving and improving in the global market. I think that the company has satisfactory and respectable advertising system, which helps Nokia to get close enough to the receivers all over the world.

Nokia Company can be categorized as market leader hereunder mobile phone market, and it can be easily observed that their wide range of products which may be too often to change its model .

Load management system should be given in production process which will allow the production managers to carry a balance load order in the production line which will help “Motorola Corp”. To improve the efficiency and focused on each order once at a time, monotonous can be eliminate among the employee they should be shift in the job responsibility.

Job responsibility and task should be very specific and clear to each employee in the production process and time slot should be given to each employee in order to focus on both the production line that is for fault product line and new product line.

There should be management responsibility to establish a separate department for customer complaint that will allow the management to keep issue separate from the new product development department and faulty product department.

References

Kaynak, K. (2003), the relationship between total quality management practices and their effects of firm performance, Journal of Operations Management.

Das, A. Handfield, R.J., and Ghosh, S. (2000), a contingent perspective of quality management – the impact of international competition on quality, Decision Sciences.

Douglas, T.J., and Judge, W.Q., Jr. (2001), Total quality management implementation and competitive advantage: The role of structural control and exploration, Academy of Management Journal.

Reed R., Lemak, D. J. and Montgomery J. C. (1996), Commitment to total quality management: is there a relationship with firm performance? Journal of Quality Management.

Reed, R., Lemak, D. and Mero, N. (2000) Total quality management and sustainable competitive advantage, Journal of Quality Management.

Total Quality Management (2004), Third Edition Dale, Carol, Glen and Mary; Pearson Publishing.

Operations and Process Management (2009), Second Edition by Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers, Robert Johnston and Alan Betts

Principle of operation management (1993), First edition by R.L. Galloway; Mackay Britian.

Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award 1988 Winner Motorola Inc. 2002, Balbridge National Quality Program.

Taguchi, G., 1986, “Introduction to quality engineering,” Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo

Lewis, B. R., 1989, “Quality in the service sector – a review,” International Journal of Bank Marketing

Margolies, J. M., 1988, When good service isn’t good enough, PriceWaterhouse, Dallas

www.thetimes100.co.uk

http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/consumer/quality/index.htm

http://www.balancedscorecard.org/thedemingcycle/tabid/112/default.aspx

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/risk-management/ishikawa

 

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