Operation management of Tom Pulling Toys, a toy manufacturing company Essay

Operation management of Tom Pulling Toys, a toy manufacturing company - Essay Example The firm observed in the study is Tom Pulling Toys, an English toy manufacturing firm based in China. For a long time, it enjoyed positive market response maintaining the mantle of being at the helm of market leadership. However, as China develops and more toy manufacturing firms get set up, there appears to be a problem. The company’s performance has hit a snag in the recent past. This negative market response is attributed to the quality of the products that the firm produces. There is a great likelihood that the company has not been producing poor quality toys and this is evident in the high number of toys that clients return to the company with quality related defects. The fact that clients return defective toys to the shops was a clear indication of the fact that the company had been producing low quality toys. The problem under investigation, therefore, is to determine whether the speculation, that the production of poor quality toys is responsible for the poor performan ce of the company recently, is true. This is based on the fact that clients have been returning semi standard goods made by the company. In an attempt to determine this, the company is employing a quality regulating tool that is new to the firm and the market. This has been christened the statistical process control. To effectively carry out the test on the quality of the products from the company, the research used random sampling of the toys and one aspect of the quality that was put under tight scrutiny was the colour of the toys. For a period of thirty days, the research was run on the colour defective toys with each day having a total of two hundred toys being collected. For the very thirty days, three toys were randomly collected and their heights measured and recorded in centimetres. The study carried out on colour revealed major colour defects on the toys with lots of clients returning to the firm defective toys. Colour is an important aspect of marketing; the marketing depa rtment ought to have put into consideration the effects defective colours would have had on the company’s product. Below is a table showing fifteen days and an average of 3% of returned toys on the basis of colour alone. Sample Number Number Of Defectives Units Inspected Percentage Of Deformities 1 3 200 1.5 2 6 200 3 3 7 200 3.5 4 6 200 3 5 6 200 3 6 9 200 4.5 7 2 200 1 8 2 200 1 9 7 200 3.5 10 8 200 4 11 9 200 4.5 12 11 200 5.5 13 3 200 1.5 14 5 200 2.5 15 6 200 3 Discussion and Recommendations Quality plays an important role in determining the market position that a firm holds. In the past, Tom Pulling Toys was known as the quality leader in the market which meant greater revenue collection. However, competition is an aspect of business and as it increases so should a company find leverages over competitors which for Tom pulling company would have been the quality of their products. Unfortunately, the firm was reluctant in checking into this and the result was the declinin g financial returns. The study revealed that, in deed, the firm was not taking into account the