Operations and Quality Management for SWOT Analysis-myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theOperations and Quality Management for SWOT Analysis. Answer: Introduction: Quest diagnostic is one of the prominent diagnostic testing, information and services provider in United States. The report is prepared to discuss strategy of operation that would align to overall objectives of business. Evaluation of capacity and quality assurance from the perspective of operations is done by performing SWOT analysis. Quality system of Quest diagnostic is evaluated by recommending a strategy. In the later section, capacity management strategy is recommended to organization and performance is improved by evaluating the effectiveness of same. Discussion: Developing operating strategy contributing overall objective of business: In this section, alternative application of concepts of operations and quality management for aiding the resolution of difficulties is evaluated. The objective of Quest diagnostic is to improve health of patients through consummate diagnostic innovation and insights and providing them with excellent services by easy access to health information. Diagnostic centre intends to provide excellence in clinical testing and to provide customers and patient with unparalleled services. Development of operation strategy incorporates specifying and refining business strategy of company (Akalin et al., 2016). In current scenario, revenue services group of organization has the responsibility of recording the billing of patients. National customer service centres has inefficiency in their outbound and inbound calls and inefficiency of caller to assist patients in better way. Waiting time of customers are extended to long time for just answering the call by representatives and they are not able to a nswer the questions properly and solve the queries of patients. Therefore, the problems is faced in providing health information and they are not able to access it easily. For millions of patients every week, critical input to healthcare decisions are provided by Quest diagnostic. Viewing the current scenario of Quest Diagnostic Company, the objective of company is to improve and retain their performance in terms of reduction of cost and reducing customer waiting time over phone calls and providing them with health information (Anand Gray, 2017). The operation strategy of quest diagnostic can be modelled on the capacity decision problems in terms of number of employees given service time distribution, interval arrival time distribution and other constraints such that only one percent of patient have to wait for some specific time. The objective of operation strategy is to find solution at minimum cost and reducing waiting time of patients over phone call. In order to address the waiting problems, some of the strategies that can be taken by organization include shifting of operations to other departments and acquiring additional resources in business. The ability of operation system to achieve resource productivity targets and service quality is capacity management by matching supply and demand (Krajewski et al., 2016). Process operational strategy can be appointed by Quest diagnostic that helps in organization the way services are delivered to customers or patients. Such requirements are met within the cost constraints and managerial limitations. Long-term efficiency as well as production and service capability of business, quality of services produced (Stevenson Sum, 2015). SWOT analysis on capacity and quality assurance of quest Diagnostics: In this section, quality management and operations problems faced by Quest diagnostic is explored and discussed. Strength- One of strength of capacity of Quest diagnostic is transparency in pricing and lowest priced charged from patient for diagnostic test as compared to in house testing charge by hospitals. Quest has electronic medical record portal that would enable them access information and results about information of patient. Thus would make them efficient in ordering and enable them to take better decision. A one shop stop for diagnostic test is offered by company at lower prices compared to in house testing. Due to number of acquisitions by company, top line growth was experienced by company and the power of evolving growth strategy is experienced by company through its strong financial performance. Growth of organization has been driven by emphasizing on growth efforts by looking into new businesses, markets, value added plays such as leveraging the capacity of information technology and new services (Bromiley Rau, 2013). Weakness- Limited market share is enjoyed by quest diagnostic due to intense competition prevailing in diagnostic business. Organization experiences escalating cost of operations due to requirement of large number of employees. Due to continuous focus on enhancing productivity, organisation does not pay attention on solving queries of customers and providing them with prompt response. One weakness that is prevailing in this organization that they are losing their key customers due to increased waiting time and inability of representatives to answer and respond to customers (Hurlbert Gupta, 2015). Opportunity- Quest diagnostics is expanding horizontally into new therapeutic areas and they are expanding globally through strategic acquisitions. There are dozens of acquisition across United States that lead to considerable growth of business. Such acquisitions have helped in providing opportunities for growth expansion and profitability as it enabled them to purchasing their own equipment, providing service to customers through their own call centres. Such acquisitions have assisted in enjoying top line growth and further opportunities for expansion. Threat- Quest diagnostic faces threat from labs that are owned by government. Such laboratories offers cheaper diagnostic testing compared to that offered by quest. Moreover, ongoing changes in framework of healthcare policy of different countries also poses threat to operations of company. Another main threatening factor of Quest is high turnover in patient service centres. High turnover is also witnessed in logistics. Turnover incurred huge cost for organization in terms of on boarding, recruiting, time to full productivity and training. Profitability position of organization is hampered due to annual loss resulting from departing employees (Slack et al., 2015). Recommending capacity management strategy and critically evaluating its effectiveness for improving performance. The capacity decision within an organization is crucial that assist them in proving major insight in determination of operating cost and limit of output. An organization faces long term consequences due to basic decisions involved in capacity. Three inputs are required to be considered while considering capacity planning within the organization. Ascertaining a medium between capabilities of organization and long-term supply and long term demand predicted demand is provided by important concept of capacity planning (Sebastiano et al., 2017). Any actual changes in capacity is required to be changed by capacity planning. Decision of capacity planning is long-term in nature and strategic. Such planning can be described as matching organizational capabilities with predicted demand of patient in future. Short-term and long-term are the types of capital planning. Quest diagnostic requires short-term capacity planning that takes into consideration over time budgets, size of workforce and inv entories. Some of activities concerning capacity planning involves forecasting needs of long range future capacity, assessing existing facilities capacity, analysing and identifying capacity for future needs and selecting alternative of capacity that aligns with achieving firms strategic mission. Organization is required to take into considerations technical, economic and financial factors for evaluating the alternative sources of capacity (Sabella et al., 2014). Capacity management strategies: (Source: Jacobs Chase, 2013) Quest diagnostic is need to employ capacity management requirement planning that is a technique that helps in determination of personnel and labour capacities and equipment requirement for meeting the objectives of services and production in according to material requirement planning and master production schedule. There are two types of capacity management strategies comprising of level capacity plan and matching capacity with demand plan. Quest is recommended to employ matching capacity with demand plan. Under this plan, the capacity of production is matched with demand of patient in each period such as weekly, quarterly and monthly demand. For matching the demand of patients in the given scenario, the flow of materials, employees and personnel and capacity of machines are changed from quarter to quarter or on monthly basis to match with the demand of patients (Oakland, 2014). This would help in reducing the cost of operations and back ordering cost, however there are frequent chan ges in workforce. Employment of different capacity management strategy would assist operation managers in maintain current level of services for achieving the goals of organization. They are capable of estimating the operational expenses and developing financial projections required for fulfilling the capacity of services of organization. Operation mangers of quest diagnostic can be assisted in reducing the waiting time of customers over phone calls by enabling representatives to allocate customer in the given time period. Operation managers bring changes to organization in ways that help them to stay competitive (Tang et al., 2016). Capacity planning involves estimation of demand involves estimation of demand while determining capacity facilities and they enable them to change the capacity of organization to respond accordingly to change in demand (Mosadeghrad Afshari, 2016). This enable the operation managers to solve the ongoing issues faced by business and matching the scenario of demand and supp ly. All the aspects of operation management of organization are covered under capacity planning. Recommending strategy for continuous evaluation of quality system of company: One of the important principle of total quality management is making continuous improvement. Quality system of company is considered as efficient if the project implementation is done coordinated directly by well-proportioned team and executives of company. One of the strategy that can be used for evaluation of quality system of an organization is auditing as it helps in providing consistency, formality and independency. Quantitative indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of the quality system are required to be incorporated. For continuously evaluating the quality system, Quest is required to implement efficient model of quality management system and this particular model evaluates the quality system of organization in different aspects. Such aspects includes evaluating the quality culture of organization, evaluating the quality management system efficiency, evaluating the process criteria efficiency, evaluating management principles for continuous success. Moreover, this model incorporated using auditing as a tool for evaluating the quality system effectiveness. One of the most important factors for evaluating the quality system in accordance with this model is evaluation of quality expenses and process criteria (Heizer, 2016). Organization prepares insight of efficiency of quality system by analysing the data. Furthermore, relative quality indicator is calculated that gives the indication of level of implementation of the goal of quality that has been set by organizations. Statistical relationships have been observed between relative expenses and relative efficiency criteria that depicts independency in variation. While evaluating the quality system of organization, it is required by employees of organization to understand the quality management principle. For the administrative employees of organization, a system quality management training is required to be developed. Continuous improvement in organization can be developed by requiring support and lon g-term view of management (Busing Palocsay, 2016). Conclusion: From above discussion and analysis of scenario faced by Quest diagnostic, it is ascertained that company is losing their key customer and increased cost in incurred for maintaining operations. It has been ascertained from the analysis that Quest has opportunities to grow in the long-run provided they are able to manage operations in an efficient and seamless way. The capacity management strategies of organization are implemented in terms of matching demand of patients with the existing capacity of company. Nonetheless, in the present situation, investment cannot be made as the cost of operations is already rising due to numerable personnel involved in operation. Therefore, employment of capacity strategy matching the demand would be suitable for reducing the waiting time of patients over phone calls. Employment of such strategy would also assist organization in electronic medical record portal. References list: Akalin, G. I., Huang, Z., Willems, J. R. (2016). Is Supply Chain Management Replacing Operations Management in the Business Core Curriculum?. Operations and Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, 9(2), 119-130. Anand, G., Gray, J. V. (2017). Strategy and organization research in operations management. Journal of Operations Management. Bromiley, P., Rau, D. (2016). Operations management and the resource based view: Another view. Journal of Operations Management, 41, 95-106. Busing, M. E., Palocsay, S. W. (2016). 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