Ritika Tapuriah (A0122974B) Operations Management - Final Reflection1

BMA5010A - Managing Operations Personal Final Reflection78 March 2015

Submitted by:Ritika Tapuriah (A0122974B)ritika.tapuriah@u.nus.eduNUS MBA Full Time Intake 2014ToJamie DimonCEO, JP Morgan Chase

I was associated with JP Morgan Chase for 3 years as a technical analyst and a business analyst in the Retail Financial Services vertical. I have had the opportunity to pursue my MBA at National University of Singapore. However I am taking this opportunity to highlight few aspects that I think could improve your current business processes that I have learnt post my course on Operation Management. In the sectors I have worked, I have had the opportunity to understand the reliance of banks operations on its technology. JP Morgan invests a magnificent amount of money in maintaining its technical systems and her 25,000+ strong technical workforce across the world and I was personally expecting the bank to be a pioneer in innovations in the banking domain. During my course I have learned new initiatives that could be applied to improve the efficiency of the system. Of the many experiments and readings that were conducted during our course, three of them made me think about ways to improve the already present processes in your firm.In the first experiment, we were divided into teams and asked to make paper puppets based on a specific client requirements. The client requirements were communicated by the team leader to the team based on his understanding. The team was divided into 4 sub teams, responsible for cutting, folding, coloring and inspecting the end products. The inspection for quality was the last role played in the manufacturing process and opinion of the product to be failed or pass seemed to be very late which lead us to take more time in setting it right. As the cost of identifying a defect at the end of the process is huge and the time taken to rectify that defect is also very long we needed to have intermediary quality control inspection of the product throughout the important process. This would ensure that defects are identified in a timely manner and rectified on the go.If we apply the same principle here in your firm when developing technology and applications for the bank, we should be adopting an agile methodology rather than a waterfall process. Every person working on the project whether a business analyst, technical analyst, product manager, or a quality assurer have to work together in every step to ensure that any deviation from the client requirements are identified immediately and rectified before moving ahead and letting the shortcoming snowball into a bigger and costlier defect. Gradually increase quality rather than ignoring current bugs or instituting quick fixes and saying "Wait until next release". Another experiment that was conducted helped us understand how the outcomes vary when we change the environment of the experiment. As we had seen a couple of years back, when Hurricane Sandy had hit US and the operations of the US offices in New York and New Jersey and all along the east coast were affected, the operations in offices in other parts of the world were also impacted due to their dependence on the headquarters in New York. This event had shown us how we had to improve our resiliency planning to ensure no disruption in the operations. We have come a long way from our experience during Sandy and we should continuously improve to ensure continuity.The final experiment on the beer game helped me understand the dependence of each stakeholder on one another. In a technical solutions team, we were interdependent on the business stakeholders to understand the customer requirements and communicate those requirements as enhancements or work orders to us. If the business analysts missed on this transition of information, the end results were different from the requirements hence not meeting the customer needs. This would not only mean loss in revenue and business but also loss of customers trust. Especially with a bank, the trust of the customer has to be maintained and the systems enhanced to ensure that customer experience increases without any added risks. Hope these learnings would help JP Morgan Chase in their journey ahead.Thank you.

Yours Sincerely,Ritika TapuriahTo Bill VeghteCOO, Hewlett Packard

I have been following Hewlett Packard (HP), ranked #17 on the Forbes 500 Service Company, and read that HP has had a long association with quality management tools such as Kaizen, introducing a simple seven point check-list to ensure that each function of the organization was focused on its customers, HP has made a cognizant effort to satisfy the needs of its customers. The HP Kaizen comprised of seven questions which helped answer the questions what is the purpose of our existence and what can we do to excel at our purpose?By asking these questions each business unit and department was able to understand that their primary purpose was to produce for the benefit of other departments and units. They could then apply practices to solve any problems and improve quality of their processes. Many business units can now see that as long they are producing, the other departments are surviving and so are they. Having studied about W. Edwards Deming and his 14 principles in the Operations Management class during my MBA course in National University of Singapore, I came across a few points that would help HP improve their processes and quality. 1. HP should look to create constancy of purpose toward continual improvement of products and service, distributing resources for long term needs, rather than looking at short term lucrativeness, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business. Like in the case of Yamato Transport, Co., Ltd., the main aim of the management was to look at continual business improvement and long term goals were their primary concern. 2. Advancement never stops. The customer demands vary fast, and the competition in the market grows rapidly. HP should look at eliminating delays, mistakes, defective materials/products. HP should fully understand that defective products and services are a huge cost to the system. Din Tai Fung a Taiwan based restaurant, was looking at complains from their countries of operation to understand where they were going wrong and changing the set-up as needed to suit the environment of their operation. 3. HP should look at getting rid of the need for inspection by building quality into the product. End inspection of the products/services is equivalent to planning for defects, recognizing that the process isnt correct, or that the client requirements were understood incorrectly in the first place. Inspection is too late, unproductive and expensive. HP should look at improving the process to eliminate the possibility of producing defects in the first place, thus eliminating the need for inspection on a mass basis.4. HP should look to end the practice of granting business on the base of price-tag alone. Instead, it has to focus on reducing the total cost. As in the case of Toyota, each of the supplier has been associated with Toyota over many years building trust and loyalty thereby giving the best service to Toyota. Toyota also does not select its suppliers based on lowest price bidder but based on the quality maintained by the supplier of its supplies thereby reducing the overall cost. 5. HP has to look at building trust within its employees by stubbing out fear so that all its employees can work efficiently and effectively for the organization. Collaboration and cooperation requires the workforce to be encouraged and to be made felt an integral part of the organization. People are averse to changes and any effort to improve the existing processes would be met with resistance and fear. 6. HP should look to eradicate work standards that establish quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for the management. The accountability of management must be altered from only numbers to quality.Hope these points would help HP in their journey ahead.Thank you.

Yours Sincerely,Ritika Tapuriah