Production Processes Selection

According to out textbook, the four types of production processes selection are classified into four types: “Projects, Batch production, Mass production, and Continuous production” (Russell, & Taylor, 2014).  

Projects:  These production processes when linked to a new project, they are often planned for the long term and costing the company a significant budget.  It is important to align the characteristics of both, the product and service.  Russell et al (2014), states, “Projects take a long time to complete and involve a large investment of funds”.  This holds true because such projects usually involve a new plant or new manufacturing locations.

Batch production:  This is more where are multiple amounts of productions level such as an order for a supplier that needs to be delivered on time.  “Processing many different jobs at the same time in groups of batches” (Russell et al, 2014).  This process cycle may be complicated since there are a multiple orders being produced for different customer.

Mass production:  This is for constant and repeated orders in mass production.  Russell (2014) defines this process cycle as “producing large volumes of a standard product for mass market”.  Specific product for large volume orders where not much variation is.  For this process we can think of food as an example.

Continuous production: “Producing high volume commodity products” (Russell et al, 2014).  This is something that is in an all-day 24/7 process every day of the year and designed to meet abundant demands for a product.

Considering the Porter article within the framework of the Toyota accelerator crisis, operational effectiveness or improvement was the main roots to cutting cost while increasing competitiveness.  However, operational improvement is relevant to improvement on something related to product or a process.  Toyota was focused on eliminating waste while improving their effectiveness.  Under the Toyota way philosophy implementing lean manufacturing was the key driver to their operational effectiveness.  Porter’s debate is focusing on the improvement of operational effectiveness as part of an ongoing process for management, however it is not a tradeoff for business strategy.  “Improving operational effectiveness is necessary part of management, but it’s not strategy” (Porter, 1996, p. 79).  In addition, Porter argues that Toyota’s focus on lean manufacturing and their tradeoff was lack of quality sustainability in order to reduce costs.  This was a hard hit for Toyota since they lacked a good strategy framework, they had increased their cost by all the recalls.

I believe Toyota did successfully enacted the Toyota way principles.  However, they did have a period of time where there was the trade-off of these valued principles to cutting costs.  Toyota did manage to bring the core principles and implement their Toyota way philosophy.  Since then, Toyota managed to reduce waste and cost reduction of unwanted volume productions as well as implementing the key drivers of the Toyota way principles to increase quality in operations and bring back their brand name.