Operational Strategies and Change Management Case Study

Operational Strategies and Change Management - Case Study Example Before being acquired by Rendall Graphics, Preston Plant was going through problems mostly related to the quality of the products, which were surprisingly identified the customer, HP. The company was facing many hardships in producing quality products and no concept of control over the product operations. The existing crisis revolving around the quality of products and business operating under loss, the success would have been only possible with occurrence of certain significant events. Concern by HP criticizing the work of Preston Plant which was not able to control the quality of its products which was depicted in the control chart prepared by HP itself for Preston plant, which shows that HP was performance of quality was closely monitored by HP though it was not done by the Plant, worked as a alarm bell for the plant management. Tom Branton, Managing Director, employed cost reduction strategies to bring the company expenditure down by job layoffs and decision was taken to create a portfolio for the plant dedicated to new ideas in order to establish greater confidence in the future sales and an innovative ideas was 'Photowrap' for newsprint that could be re-pulped. According According to Slack et al (2007:566)3 quality is consistent conformance to customers' expectations. The word 'conformance' is stressed upon to meet the specifications set by the customer, ensuring a product or service conforms to specification whereas consistent implies that conformance to specification is not an adhoc. The quality crisis could be diagnosed by reducing the gaps in cusomter specification-operation's specification, the concept specification, the quality specification - actual quality, the actual quality - communicated image which can be done through marketing operations, product/ service development, etc. As per the case study, prior to the acquisition by Rendall Graphics, the management was producing goods which met the specification on the customer, but they did not performed any control check on the product, which was eventually done by HP, which showed the loopholes in the performance of Preston Plant. Preston Plant, after being acquired by Rendall Graphi c underwent massive change in the operation and management wherein the departments were asked to review the day to day performance of the operations which was later put on to debate and discussion once in a month. The result was positive as the processes were coming under control, quality levels were improving and the