Motorola Inc

Case Write-up: Motorola, Inc

Problem:

The problem faced by the Paging Products Division’s Vice President and General Manager, Merle Gilmore is how to tackle on the organizational and management level issues while embarking on their new product, Son-Of-Bandit pagers. The team had successfully launched the Bandit line of pagers and they wanted to replicate its success to the new projects being undertaken by the organization. They did not want to repeat the mistakes they made during the course of the Bandit project and apply the lessons learnt to upcoming projects within their division as well as throughout the organization.

Goals to be achieved:

1) To compete with the Japanese companies by improving quality of their products. They intend to do this by applying six sigma concepts to their manufacturing processes and future projects.

2) To improve their manufacturing processes using robotics and animations. The criterion for obtaining this goal is to reduce operation costs and hence reduce the product cost. This will help them create a competitive edge.

3) To improve processes in an incremental step wise fashion and focus at one aspect of improvement at a time.

Alternative:

The alternative course of production is to carry out the production as was the case in manufacture of Bandit pagers. The managers could follow the combined automated and conventional approach which means follow a semi-automated production process.

Recommendation:

I would recommend the managers at Motorola to follow a fully-automated manufacturing process as opposed to the production process followed for Bandit pagers. However, they should continue with the heavyweight team structure they had for the Bandit pagers.