Explain at least one current and future challenge impacting

Explain at least one current and future challenge impacting quality in Business (Manufacturing).

Solution

A manufacturer’s brand and bottomline is directly related to the quality of products that it is manufacturing. A good quality product not only requires manufacturers to procure and make use of high quality raw materials, but it also requires them to constantly improve and improvise the manufacturing systems and processes. High quality products results in positive brand image for the manufacturer and more sales leads resulting from the positive word-of-mouth from the existing customers. However, there are persistent challenges to quality management that manufacturing companies around the world frequently face. The issues vary from company to company depending on their management culture, policies and size of the organisation.

Some of the current challenges that impacts quality in manufacturing businesses are discussed below:

Complex Supply Chain: More and more enterprises, small, medium or large, are venturing into new regions where they can capitalise on the lower production costs, easy availability of raw materials and skilled manpower. Because of the movement in production facilities, the supply chain has become extremely complex requiring companies to smoothly coordinate and move raw materials, semi finished goods or finished goods between different manufacturing units of the organisation located at diverse geographical locations round the world. If the manufacturing company’s logistics is not efficient in handling goods between their multiple production units, it can severely affect the quality of the final products. In addition to poor quality, inefficient supply chain can also lead to high production costs further affecting manufacturer’s bottomline.

Increasing global competition: It is not uncommon for a manufacturer to procure raw materials from a global supplier in a bid to control its overall manufacturing costs. With increasing global competition, the domestic suppliers are forced to match the prices and bids of the international suppliers in order to remain in the business, thus affecting the quality of the products manufactured and supplied. Although, manufacturing companies have pre-defined quality standards and specifications of the goods that they procure externally, most of the domestic as well as international suppliers resort to using sub-standard raw materials to produce goods at lower costs and match the bids of their competitors. Also, because of increasing customisation demands, quality of the raw materials supplied and used is greatly hampered.

Talking about the future challenges that is going to largely impact business (manufacturing), the biggest challenge that the manufacturers of the world are going to face in future is the shortage of skilled manpower. Finding enough people with the right skills and talent is becoming a major issue for the human resource managers of the manufacturing companies. With increasing demands in wages and increasing employee turnover, acquiring and retaining talent will be a major challenge for companies round the world. Globalisation has also opened gates for the domestic labours to move to more lucrative and stable economies in search of better employment opportunities and quality lifestyle. With shortage of human supply, it will be difficult in future for the manufacturing companies to manufacture good quality products in timely and cost-effective manner. Dearth in human resource can also lead to automation of larger number of manufacturing processes.