QUESTION 2 [35 MARKS] Mini Case Study: Automation for Enhanced Customer Service at HomeComfort Creations
HomeComfort Creations is a major South African home appliance production company. It produces generic home appliances which are stored in a warehouse and sold online via a website or a call centre. HomeComfort Creations makes use of an inventory strategy where products are made in advance of customer orders and stored in anticipation of demand. The company has therefore used a mix of automation technology and process improvement systems to stabilise call-centre costs in the face of increasing call volumes.
The company launched an automation centre of excellence that deployed robotic process automation and intelligent document processing. It identified high-impact use cases that optimised employee time while ensuring a positive experience for the customer. By using automation to better enable employees to focus their attention on solving customer needs, the programme has saved more than 15,000 employee hours. HomeComfort Creations thus built a system where its people could work alongside technology to truly meet customers’ needs.
At the beginning of 2022, HomeComfort Creations received feedback from many of its loyal customers. The feedback from these surveys stated that customers were extremely happy with HomeComfort Creations’ call centre and online ordering service. Because of the quick and easy online and call-centre ordering service, many customers have expressed their desire to have access to a service where they could order customised home appliances tailored to their specific needs and preferences. This would be in addition to the ability to order generic home appliances.
Required:
As the operations manager of HomeComfort Creations, you understand the overall purpose of process design is to meet customers’ needs through achieving appropriate levels of quality, speed, dependability, flexibility, and cost. Using the above scenario as a starting point, discuss how process design can be used by HomeComfort Creations to adapt its current inventory strategy to introduce customised home appliances. (5 marks)
Your answer should consider the objectives of an additional inventory strategy, and how this would affect HomeComfort Creations’ current inventory strategy of make-to-stock. (15 marks)
Lastly, your answer should investigate whether HomeComfort Creations’ current automation technologies and process improvement systems could be adapted for an additional inventory strategy. (15 marks)
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