Enterprise Resource Planning and Supply Chain Management
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) can be used to enhance the performance of supply chain management (SCM) by ensuring that businesses are able to understand customer requirements, provide up-to-date information about inventory location and status to assist in better production and shipment planning, and improve techniques of performance monitoring (Christopher, 2011). As such, the relationship is unidirectional based on the fact that ERP has the capacity to make SCM more effective and responsive to customer and market needs, though SCM has no effect on ERP. Additionally, it is evident that ERP has the capacity to assist organizations in managing the tasks and responsibilities of different suppliers, administer data for multiple business activities (e.g., product planning, cost analysis, manufacturing, service delivery, marketing, and sales), support growth of the supply value chain, as well as ensure better space utilization (Maras, 2016). Based on these observations, it can be argued that ERP serves as an engine that feeds the growth and development of SCM.
Role and Benefits of Operations Management
In the context of a large supermarket, the role of operations management would be to assist in managing the products and the personnel, particularly in terms of oversight of inventory, purchasing, and supplies, hiring employees, overseeing the assignment of employees, as well as planning staff development. Large supermarkets must source supplies, plan inventories, finance operations, and distribute supplies from warehouses to the shelves. All these functions are at the core of operations management since the domain revolves around overseeing the timely acquisition of supplies, designing efficient processes to produce the product and/or service, controlling business processes, ensuring adequate numbers of properly trained employees, as well as redesigning business operations with the view to achieving efficiency and effectiveness in the sale of goods and/or services (Joglekar & Levesque, 2013). Lastly, the domain of operations management is likely to benefit a large supermarket in terms of improving its operational efficiency, ensuring that customer loyalty and sales are propped up through efficient management of inventory and human resources, enhancing the supermarket’s competitive standing by helping it to understand its internal and external conditions, as well as facilitating the way it replenishes its inventory, manages its supply chain for goods and services, and controls human capital (Venkat, Kekre, Hegde, Shang, & Campbell, 2015).
Process Layout and Cell Layout
Available literature demonstrates that the process layout or framework is found primarily in job shops or in organizations that produce customized, low-volume products that often need diverse processing requirements and successions of operations, while the cellular layout is to a large extent associated with organizations that group production machinery according to the process requirements for a set of similar items that need comparable processing (Gultekin, Akturk, & Karasan, 2008).
Based on the provided definitions, it is evident that the cellular layout has the advantages of cost (cellular manufacturing provides for quicker processing time, minimal material handling, minimal work-in-process inventory as well as reduced setup time, all of which minimize costs), flexibility (cellular manufacturing allows for the production of small batches, which provides some level of enhanced flexibility), and motivation (since employees are cross-trained to run every machine in the cell, boredom and lack of independence are minimized) (Arkat, Hosseinabadi, Mehdi, & Hosseini, 2012). Unlike in the process layout where skill level is not primarily important, the cellular layout requires workers to have a high skill level, hence the need to cross-train them so that they are able to operate every machine in the cell.
References
Arkat, J., Hosseinabadi, F., Mehdi, H., & Hosseini, L. (2012). Integrating cell formation with cellular layout and operations scheduling. International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 61, 637-647. Web.
Christopher, M. (2011). Logistics and supply chain management (4th ed.). New York, NY: FT Press.
Gultekin, H., Akturk, M.S., & Karasan, O.E. (2008). Scheduling in robotic cells: Process flexibility and cell layout. International Journal of Production Research, 48, 2105-2121. Web.
Joglekar, N., & Levesque, M. (2013). The role of operations management across the entrepreneurial value chain. Production & Operations Management, 22, 1321-1335. Web.
Maras, E. (2016). ERP takes on a bigger role in managing supply chains. Food Logistics, 176, 36-40. Web.
Venkat, A., Kekre, S., Hegde, G.G., Shang, J., & Campbell, T.P. (2015). Strategic management of operations in the emergency department. Production & Operations Management, 24, 1706-1723. Web.