Task: Develop a new product/service and develop a comprehensive plan for the operation process.

You are required to:

• Develop a new product/service. You should first critically review the processes needed to develop a new product by identifying the customer needs, defining the appropriate level of product/service quality, and considering the other perspectives, i.e., liability issues, ethical considerations, sustainability issues, costs and profits. Apply Kano model to classify the quality of your product/service. Then develop the house of quality for your product/service with clear explanation.
• Define the bill of material and develop the MRP for your product/service. You should research and collect necessary data if needed. You can also make assumptions of data like the number of products should be planned each month or lot size.
• Define the inventory ordering policies for all components in the bill of material. Estimate necessary data like lead time for your calculation. Cover the issues of order size, reordering point, safety stock.
• Investigate top two challenges and discuss directions that relate to operations management of your product/service to effectively and efficiently manage it.

Example:

Your group plan to open a bottling plant and sell water bottles to RMIT students. After the product design stage, you decide to sell the water bottles which are cheaper than other brands in the market like Mount Franklin or Pump with funny design that attracts young people.

The bill of material includes water, labels and plastic bottle and you forecast that the demand is 10,000 bottles per month.

You then search for cheap suppliers of those components, obtain the data and start the plan for MRP and inventory management. How should your product design and/or production plan and/or inventory management policies be adapted to deal with this challenge?