MOM705 Operations Management: Service Firms, Industry 4.0 & Plastics

This report delves into the critical role of operations management in enhancing the performance of service organizations, emphasizing the integration of forecasting tools, supply chain optimization, and emerging trends like automation and employee analytics. It reviews academic literature on entrepreneurship and technology commercialization, highlighting the importance of sustainable practices. The report further examines the application of Industry 4.0 principles, such as interoperability and decentralized decision-making, within manufacturing contexts like AirTac International Group. Finally, it addresses the pressing issue of plastic waste, advocating for thermal depolymerization as a sustainable recycling method to mitigate environmental impact. Desklib offers a wealth of similar solved assignments and past papers to aid students in their studies.

Running head: OPERATION MANAGEMENT
Operation Management
Name of Student:
Name of University:
Author’s Note:

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Table of Contents
Answer to Question 1......................................................................................................................2
Answer to Question 2......................................................................................................................4
Answer to Question 3a.....................................................................................................................6
Answer to Question 3b....................................................................................................................6
Answer to Question 4......................................................................................................................7
References......................................................................................................................................10

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Answer to Question 1
In the recent years there has been lot of articles which has witnessed the role of
operations management associated to the operation performance in the service organizations. The
main recognition of the issues has been seen to be based on the emphasis of the question how the
operations management related activities has impacted the service level of firms. The future
studies can focus on the different aspects like the geographic location, type of industry and
tenure of the OM practice within the service organizations. The consideration of the geographic
location operations will influence the larger clients in obtaining the operational practices for the
smaller service organizations.
In case of the application of the operations concepts for the future organization the main
implementation of the operational ideas is depicted with prediction of the customer’s demand
such that the production can be continued adequately. The application of the forecasting tools is
conducive for the management in terms of deciding the level of production, what to produce and
when to produce a particular item. The future organizations are also depicted to be benefitted by
ensuring effective monitoring and controlling of the supply chain activities. Some of the various
types of the supply chain activities are also seen to be benefitted with the consideration of the
configuration of the demand requirements for the raw material and the same is continued with
the production of the final products of the firm.
The improvement in the operations needs to be further understood with the recent trends
which is evident in the fields of automatization, performance management, employee analytics
and outsourcing. The automatization processes in the business can be improved with the
application of the concepts of the operations management. In terms of the online reservation

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process, automated chatbots, inline transactions function and check ins, there has been lot of
issues which are related to the dependency on the technology. This is seen to be done by
dedicating the machines to a particular business and the companies are seen to be freeing with
the time of the employee and monitoring of the performance and the on-site sales. This will be
able to free up the time of the employees and thereby focus on the customers and the products.
The application of the operational concepts will further allow the future organizations to
produce detailed analytics which will provide the baseline for the implementation of the changes
in the areas of production and development to the customer service. The implementation of the
new control will allow the companies to track the performance of the websites and also focus on
the employee productivity along with communication. The different types of the mobile
collaboration app will allow the organization to identify the employees actively engaged in the
collaboration and requiring assistance. In addition to this, operations management is beneficial in
developing the surveys and automating the delivery process. It is further depicted to be useful in
taking feedback from the employees. In several instances the prescheduling of the of the survey
campaigns are helpful in receiving the employee feedback in crucial times (Beekeeper 2018).
It needs to be further observed that the different nature of the assistance from the
operations management to the future organizations are inferred with the outsourcing strategy
among the top companies. In several instances contracting with the third-party agencies or
individuals may be helpful to the companies in saving money and at the same time ensure all the
tasks are able to receive appropriate attention. During any occasion, of the outsourcing is seen to
be cheaper in compared to the hiring cost of the cost of the additional staff, the organizations
should not have qualms for accepting the outside assistance which will be to save the company
from financial disaster at the time investment is proved to be invaluable. The process of the

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operations management is also depicted to be beneficial for the internal communications. In
general, the satisfied employees are seen to invest more in the organisation where the owners are
seen to encourage the employee satisfaction. Operations management in several perspective is
helpful in enhancement of the peer to peer communications which are conducive in enhancing
the morale and project outcomes irrespective of the industry. In addition to this, the collaboration
aspect is also helpful in addressing the concerns of the competition among the organizations and
internal workplace.
Answer to Question 2
The literature review conducted from three academic journals are illustrated as follows:
1. “The Entrepreneur and Entrepreneurship: Operational Definitions of their Role in
Society”- Robert B. Carton
The research paper proposes the operational definitions related to the
entrepreneurship and synthesize the past definitions into the operationalizable constructs.
The findings of the research have shown that the entrepreneurship is the pursuit of the
discontinuous opportunity for involving the creativity among the participants. According
to the research results the entrepreneur is seen as the team or the individual which is able
to identify the opportunity and accumulate the necessary resources which is ultimately
responsible for the organization performance (Citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. 2018). Henceforth,
entrepreneurship is seen as the means via new organizations are formed with wealth
creation and resultant job.

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2. “Operations Management Opportunities in Technology Commercialization and
Entrepreneurship”- Viswanathan Krishnan
The study enumerates that the field of Operations management and production is
increasingly considered as rigorous, although narrow field and present challenges have
concerned the mangers in job creation and growth of the company which is vital to the
economy. The research has further argued that the narrower positioning of the POM in
the past is depicted to be responsible for the limited growth and the global economies.
The production and OM is depicted with the concept of doing more with less. This well
aligned with the paradigms of the research and relevant in meeting of the emerging
challenges and thereby bringing growth mong the companies in the future. The main
discussion in the research has been able to focus on how POM is essential in meeting the
needs of the organization so that they are able to become sustainable and scalable in
nature. The main objective of the POM is further depicted to stimulate the discussion and
thought for encourage the entrepreneurial activity at an early stage (Rady.ucsd.edu.
2018).
3. “The New Field of Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Studying Entrepreneurial Action
Linking” “What Is to Be Sustained” With “What Is to Be Developed”- Dean A. Shepherd
The research paper identified the concepts of the sustainable development and
entrepreneurship literatures which has focused on the development and entrepreneurship
literature which is offered with the following of the sustainable entrepreneurship. This is
further depicted to focused on the preservation of the nature and support to the community
which is in pursuit of the perceived opportunities for the future products, gain of service

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and processes. The illustration of the diversity in the research is seen with the
advancement of the research agenda which is derived from psychology, institutional and
economics perspectives. The research has further suggested that the research questions
developed as per the sustainable entrepreneurship research. The important findings have
revealed that entrepreneurship is focused with the pursuit of the perceived opportunities
which brings the future products, services and processes into existence.
Answer to Question 3a
AirTac International Group established in 1988 with its headquarter situated in Taiwan is
recognised as the supplier and manufacturer of pneumatic equipment across the world market.
The company is specialised in producing of control components, actuators, accessories and air
preparation products for manufacturing metallurgy, environment protection, industrial fields and
packaging (Na-en.airtac.com. 2018).
Industry 4.0 is identified as the name for the trend of data exchange and
automation among the manufacturing technologies. This concept includes cloud computing,
cyber physical systems and Internet of things. The advent of industry 4.0 has also created Smart
factory which allows modular structure to be developed for factories for better operation, thereby
allowing for monitoring of physical processes. Therefore, in industry associated to
manufacturing of Pneumatic components such as Airtac Industrial (M) Sdn Bhd, smart factory
will be able to enhance the design used in robotics and add to the automation process (Lasi et al.
2014).

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Answer to Question 3b
As a Chief Operations Office, I will ensure that Industry 4.0 is able to make the best
utilisation of identification of four main design principles. This relates to the principle of
interoperability, information transparency, technical assistance and decentralised decisions. The
concretisation in the manufacturing process will focus on improving the present machines,
sensors and the devices which are used to communicate with each other via Internet. Secondly, I
will create a virtual digital plant models thereby adding the sensor data (Lee, Kao and Yang
2014). Service innovation and smart analytics for industry 4.0 and big data environment.
Procedia Cirp, 16, pp.3-8.. This will require the aggregation of the raw sensor data to be
integrated with the information. Thirdly, I will ensure that the technical assistance is supported
by aggregating the information in a comprehensive manner for solving the urgent problems
quickly and make informed decisions. I will also ensure that the cyber physical systems are
enhanced by ensuring they are adequately backed by human co-workers. The decentralised
decision-making will be taken for the ability to handle interfaces and exceptions with more
clarity where the tasks delegated to a higher authority (Brettel et al. 2014).
Answer to Question 4
According to Thompson et al. (2014), Plastics have been known to transform everyday
life with the increasing annual production of up to 300 million tonnes worldwide in 2010.
Despite of the increasing popularity, in terms of environment and human health and the use of
plastics are posing serious threat to the sustainability of mankind. Therefore, in my opinion it is
important to manufacture plastics which can be recycled and implemented into the organisational
process with operations scheduling. One method can be adopted with shifting of high valuable
low-volume production in order to resolute the problem of short-term production scheduling for

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multipurpose product in the industrial plant operations. However, in several cases it is not
possible to dispose of the waste due to stricter environmental regulations without prior treatment.
The scheduling and incorporating of waste management for plastics needs to be adopted with the
safe recycling process. Therefore, thermal depolymerization is identified as the main process of
choice for efficiently managing the recycling process of plastics in the perspective of operations
scheduling (Vadera and Gudi 2014).
In the process of thermal depolymerization the depolymerisation process will be firstly
done with hydrous pyrolysis for reducing the complex organic materials. These materials are
usually seen in form of plastic, biomass and various products of other sorts. Therefore, this
process reduces the complex organic materials like plastic into light crude oil. The process of
thermal depolymerisation is seen to be similar with the geological process for procuring fossil
fuels today. The first industrial process for obtaining of diesel fuels and several types of other
products of petroleum were seen to be containing significant amount of calcium hydroxide added
along with the mixture (Shui et al. 2015). In the early 1970s, the hydrous pyrolysis method
where exemplified by the United States patent and the production of oil from sludge and sewers
they were done in presence of carbon monoxide. In order to improve the process and eliminate
the harmful impacts of carbon monoxide, the process of thermal depolymerization was depicted
to be most viable and suited to the present environmental needs (Schieder et al. 2015).
It further mimics the natural geological process which is associated to the production of
fossil fuels. In this process, a long chain of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen decomposes the short-
chain petroleum hydrocarbons to a maximum limit of 18 carbons.

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This process is followed with Hydrothermal Liquefaction. This is seen to be distinct from
the process which involves dry materials to be depolymerisation into components such as
pyrolysis. The conversion of biomass from plastics are heated with water which is termed as the
process of “Thermochemical Conversion (TCC)” (Schuetzle et al. 2015). There have been
several other commercial scale processes including the "SlurryCarb" process which operates with
EnerTech, using a similar technology for decarboxylate the solid biowaste. The operations
scheduling process for implementation of such a system should be based on short-term bad
scheduling with the approach of minimising the downstream of the waste treatment cost.

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References
Beekeeper. (2018). 5 Important Trends in Operations Management in 2018. [online] Available
at: https://blog.beekeeper.io/5-important-trends-operations-management-2018/ [Accessed 22 Jul.
2018].
Brettel, M., Friederichsen, N., Keller, M. and Rosenberg, M., 2014. How virtualization,
decentralization and network building change the manufacturing landscape: An Industry 4.0
Perspective. International Journal of Mechanical, Industrial Science and Engineering, 8(1),
pp.37-44.
Citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. (2018). [online] Available at:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.614.2018&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[Accessed 22 Jul. 2018].
Effectuation.org. (2018). [online] Available at:
http://www.effectuation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Shepherd_et_al-2011-
Entrepreneurship_Theory_and_Practice-1.pdf [Accessed 22 Jul. 2018].
Lasi, H., Fettke, P., Kemper, H.G., Feld, T. and Hoffmann, M., 2014. Industry 4.0. Business &
Information Systems Engineering, 6(4), pp.239-242.
Na-en.airtac.com. (2018). AirTAC. [online] Available at: http://na-en.airtac.com/about.aspx?
c_kind=1&c_kind2=8 [Accessed 23 Jul. 2018].
Rady.ucsd.edu. (2018). [online] Available at: https://rady.ucsd.edu/docs/faculty/krishnan3.pdf
[Accessed 22 Jul. 2018].

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Schieder, M., Lunkenbein, T., Bojer, C., Dulle, M., vom Stein, J., Auffermann, G., Löbling, T.,
Schöbel, J., Schmalz, H. and Breu, J., 2015. Selective Template Removal by Thermal
Depolymerization to Obtain Mesostructured Molybdenum Oxycarbide. Zeitschrift für
anorganische und allgemeine Chemie, 641(10), pp.1829-1834.
Schuetzle, D., Schuetzle, R., Hoekman, S.K. and Zielinska, B., 2015. The effect of oxygen on
formation of syngas contaminants during the thermochemical conversion of
biomass. International Journal of Energy and Environmental Engineering, 6(4), pp.405-417.
Shui, H., Hui, Z., Jiang, Q., Zhou, H., Pan, C., Wang, Z., Lei, Z., Ren, S. and Kang, S., 2015.
Co-thermal dissolution of Shenmu–Fugu subbituminous coal and sawdust. Fuel Processing
Technology, 131, pp.87-92.
Thompson, R., Moore, C., vom Saal, F. and Swan, S. (2009). Plastics, the environment and
human health: current consensus and future trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1526), pp.2153-2166.
Vadera, D. and Gudi, R. (2014). Scheduling Incorporating Waste Management using
Decomposition Approaches. IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 46(32), pp.535-540.