Organizations which deliver the highest quality of service or products are the ones who receive the most customers. Prominence is therefore important. But ability is also important, if prominence brings customers to organization, ability helps organizations to retain the customers. Ability of the organization tells who they are. So the eminence and ability consist of four operational processes volume, variety, variation and visibility. Organizations survive when operations management lays in the hands of able managers to manage core activities that transform key resources into deliverable products or services. The process of creating the products and services are based fundamentally in creating value in each operational management processes.
Volume
This refers to how much production of a specific product is required to satisfy its overall demand in the market. This refers to the physical number of units or items produced. A high volume manufacturing service example would be a fast-food joint like Dominos. They sell quite literally millions of pizzas and other related food items every day around the world, and one of the known characteristics of Dominos is that they have a very high degree of consistency in all of their products and their service delivery.
Alternatively, a low-volume example might be an artist who produces specially made commissions and pieces of artwork. They are entirely unique, which are likely to take a very long time to produce and which cannot be easily replicated or repeated exactly, if at all. This is highly resource intensive and often long-term process. Scarcity is often used to boost sales, but it can also be used to create massive brand lift. It plays on the customer’s fear of missing out. Please remember this fact that marketers use limited-time offers like daily deals, limitations on quantities, or one-time only promotions to create a sense of urgency and leverage scarcity.
Volume is significant tool because it shows the confidence of buyers in a product or service. Though volume should never be used alone to determine price or selling patterns, but it is a base to gain insight into the markets and determine the next strategies.
Variety
This relates to the variety of goods/services to be produced and sold to customers. This V is all about diversity. Selling a variety of products or services helps organizations to increase sales and profit potential and reduces their dependence on one or two products, which can lead to business closure if demand for that product ends or wanes out.
For example HUL sells 44 brands spanning 14 distinct categories such as soaps, detergents, shampoos, skin care, toothpastes, deodorants, cosmetics, tea, coffee, packaged foods, ice cream, and water purifiers, the Company is a part of the everyday life of millions of consumers across India. Its portfolio includes leading household brands such as Lux, Lifebuoy, Surf excel, Rin, Wheel, Glow & Lovely, Pond’s, Vaseline, Lakmé, Dove, Clinic Plus, Sunsilk, Pepsodent, Closeup, Axe, Brooke Bond, Bru, Knorr, Kissan, Kwality Wall’s and Pureit. HUL has a product to offer each segment of the society. In an given product category its has maintained variety.
The high variety gives more flexibility to produce goods services to match the customer’s requirements. Variety and volume correlate, the higher the variety the lower the volume of the products or services.
Variation
This refers to how much the level of demand changes over some time due to external factors. However, several factors make it difficult to predict variation. For example, a natural disaster such as Covid 19 pandemic struck the world which made the entire world go topsy-turvy in all walks of life. Most business processes do not exist as singular entities but rather as a plurality of variants that need to be collectively managed. Most of these approaches are built on the assumption that the variation points and variation drivers are given as input. The question of how process variation is drawn and conceptualized in the first place has received relatively little attention. It takes lot of experience and maturity of managers to fill the gaps. When processes fail to follow a precise pattern, it causes quality issues both in transactional and production processes.
Visibility
This refers to value chain of a company’s all processes put together. The customers need to experience the company’s product/service. The service industries have a high level of visibility compared to the manufacturing industries. For example, Amazon has a track and trace software on their website which enables their customers to have visibility of where their packages are at any given time. It is important that potential customers can locate the company they are looking for. Most people have had the experience of being lost. It is truly frustrating driving around unable to find the location a customer is searching – may be its company’s workshop, warehouse, retail store, head office, customer care centre anything. Organizations must make sure that their signage is clear and visible so visitors can easily locate. Otherwise the experience can turn into a negative one. High-visibility signage has already helped easy to find repeat customers.
Unilever’s operations management is responsible for keeping the four Vs integral with high productivity throughout the global organization. Operations managers develop procedures and processes to support the organization in achieving higher volume, variety, variance and visibility. The operations team of Unilever directly supports marketing, sales, financial and HR performance. It essentially addresses concerns in all strategic decision areas to maintain high productivity. As a leading consumer goods firm, Unilever has evolved operations management approaches to keep all four Vs highly productive.
