You will prepare and submit a term paper on Operations Management Issues with Carter's Bakery. Your paper should be a minimum of 3500 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Operations Management Issues with Carter's Bakery. Your paper should be a minimum of 3500 words in length. Operations management involves inputs into the system, which include the equipment and ingredients used to produce their cakes, and the Carter’s have expressed their concern over the possibility that this could affect their outputs.&nbsp. As part of the consultation, a few operations management issues have been identified and recommendations have been presented.

Carter’s Bakery differentiates itself from its competitors by specializing in high quality decorated fruit cakes, instead of making a variety of products.&nbsp. This suggests that Carter’s Bakery is focussing on its quality objective (Waters 2002, Slack et al 2007) and this is reflected in the bakery’s processes and procedures which place an emphasis on quality.&nbsp. However, the need to maintain quality has raised the operational management issue of design.&nbsp. Carter’s Bakery is currently operating on a batch process which means that there is little room for variation and flexibility (Waters 2002, Slack et al 2007).&nbsp. This process is appropriate for the volume of orders that Carter’s Bakery is processing, and the high volumes can only be output by a batch process.&nbsp. However, the bakery also decided to capitalize on growing sales by producing smaller cakes to retail shops for family purchases and this is when the operations design issue became apparent to the owners.&nbsp. Due to the high demand for the later product, the bakery had to increase production, and even this was not enough to sustain demand.&nbsp. The batch process can no longer sustain the operations of the bakery as the process requires certain periods of rest which do not allow for the bakery to meet demand.&nbsp. For instance, it takes three hours for one batch of small cakes and four for the larger cakes, which means that there is a period when the equipment cannot be used to generate cakes.&nbsp. The increasing demand for smaller cakes calls for a different design in the form of mass processes which are appropriate for high volume and low variety goods (Waters 2002, Slack et al 2007) such as the cakes being made by the bakery.&nbsp. The mass process was appropriate when the business started as they could predict the demand, and therefore produce in batches and use less storage space.&nbsp.