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Table of Contents
Suggestions for Bridging the Gap.
Gap Analysis
Gap Analysis as implied by Gurumurthy and Kodali (2009) is where a company desires to reach and which is different to that of its current situation. Anthony’s Orchard has been able to operate for around 60 years and continues to do so with evolving goals for the future.
Currently, the company has established its goals to be reached by 2015, where it aims to move towards the targeted revenue of $25 million for 2015 (Laureate Education, Inc. 2012a).
This the company aims by increasing its product lines or acquisition of more orchards. On the other hand, the company is currently operating with a revenue of $11,005,208 from the sale of Prepared Apple Products, Pick Your Own Apples and Community Events. This implies a gap of $13,994,792 (25,000,000 – 11,005,208) (Laureate Education, Inc. 2012a).
Suggestions for Bridging the Gap
According to Allison Sinclair, the director of operations, the company lacked quality management systems to ensure that the operations of the company were effective and efficient via benchmarking. Also, Allison stated regarding the willingness of the company to adopt systems of quality management and continuous improvement (Laureate Education, Inc. 2012b).
In this regards, the company could aim to align its operational activities with best practices so that it could lead to the accomplishments of its financial targets as explained by Tan, Kannan and Narasimhan (2007).
This the company can do by internalising the information gathered regarding best practices and dividing the efforts required over the time period in which the goal has to be achieved. This can be done via benchmarking for each period and using tools such as Key Performance Indicators to measure the results.
Also, where the company plans on using continuous improvements and quality management it can try to reduce its costs on a continuous basis so that competitive prices to the customers can be offered each time so as to increase sales and remain competitive. Additionally, each part of the value chain of the organisation should be analysed for quality improvements and cost reductions and this could also be benchmarked to reach a particular level of quality and the benchmarks revised for continuous assessment of the value chain for improvements.
The company could alternatively try to make its revenues less sensitive to order cancellation for example by trying to reduce its dependency over few consumers and market its product effectively to get hold of more customers.
Moreover, the director of the operation stated that since the company has been successful, it may go on to think that it has done things perfectly and that this is the way it should continue; however this reluctance may stop the company from reaching its revenue targets.
Therefore, the company may need to use strategies that it never used before so that it could work to achieve its manufacturing objectives of continuous improvement and quality management (Laureate Education, Inc. 2012b).
In this regards, the company could use the strategy suggested by Gurumurthy and Kodali (2009), who stated that for the benchmarking in a continuous improvement environment the company should conduct benchmarking by first identifying a leader who will be responsible for the process; this could be the operation’s director of Orchard and since she also has a vision regarding the whole scenario, she will be appropriate for this responsibility…
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