Bmw’s Operation Management

On an operations management basic, this article chose a tangible product-based organization – ‘BWM’ and will use this case to primarily discuss the operation management issue and analysis and design a capacity strategy, how the capacity strategy affects organization such as its operation performance and future objectives.

1. Case Introduction

In order to apply and explain the operation management issues in a detailed and practical way, this essay will use BMW’s operations as its analysis case. BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) is a world famous vehicle manufacture enterprise. BMW was started in 1916, and its original headquarters is in Munich, Germany. Almost once upon a century, from a plane engine manufacture firm, BMW developed into today’s advanced car-oriented company.

The BMW group has three brands, BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. As a product-based organization, BMW’s manufacture operations function is playing a significant role in its broad strategy. BMW has its sights set firmly in the international automobile market. To achieve its aims, “From research and development to sales and marketing, BMW Group is committed to the highest quality for all its products and services. The company’s success to date is proof of this strategy’s correctness.” (BMW Official Website, 2009).

2. A review of the differences between services operations and manufacturing operations.

A service operation could be considered as a customer processing operation(R Johnston,1987), a manufacturing operation is defined as any action performed by man or machine on raw materials, intermediate, or finished products…(F. Choobineh,1988). Operations management is the activity of managing the resources which are devoted to the production and delivery of products and services (Slack et al., 2007). Both services operations and manufacturing operations are all use technology, and quality, productivity, and response issues are highly required for both of them. They all need to...