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Assignment #4

Following a thorough contextual analysis of Kellogg Company limited, it has become clearly evident that it is facing a current problem of increasing product recalls. The company has had some of its brand losing the taste and preferences of the customers as initial. This has proved to be very injurious to the company image and to the particular brand recalled. The overall performance of the sales has also presented a clear indication that in the long run the other offering sales of the company will be affected especially during the period the recall is affected.

Based on the causal analysis, some of the plausible solutions that can be adopted by the company ranges from adopting effective quality control measures, reassessing the goals of the company for the coming years, reinvesting the money obtained from the projects in business for growth purposes amongst others.

By maintaining quality standards as high as possible, the company will be able to eliminate contaminants in its products at the consumer end. Through proper quality control procedures, the confidence of the customers can be secured and the company will be able to register better operating profits following the fact that the company will be able to witness higher sales.

The re-assessment of the goals for the coming years is also advisable to be done where there is no change of sales and the operating profits are getting lower. The company has to set realistic goals which can be achieved over the long time (Rao, 2013). For the case of money that is achieved from the company projects, it is wise enough for the company to re-invest in improving the brand through adapting new technologies to fit the current market demands. When the company is not doing well it will be advisable for the company to revise its goals and consider implementing job specialization so that the workers are set in jobs that they are well conversant with. This will contribute towards better performance besides maintaining the quality of the services that they deliver. The workers as well will be motivated since they do activities that they enjoy doing. The company finally has to consider adopting better customer friendly non-genetically modified food. This will go a long way in enticing the trust of the consumers in buying the company products.

The company must consider using the weighted-criteria decision matrix tool to evaluate the major factors that can lead to greater fall of the company performance in both short term and the long run periods (Totik, 1994). In carrying out the analysis, the major factors that must be considered for evaluation of the solutions to the current and expected future problems in the company include the customer confidence, the long term effects, the recall brand impacts and the company reputation.

The weights can then be assigned to each factor based on the magnitude of its result on the company performance in terms of sales (Rao, 2013). Consider the table below that shows the rating on the factors that influences the sale performance for the Kellogg Company limited.

As discussed earlier the solutions to the problems rest in quality control, re-assessment of goals, employee payment variation and the re-investments in business. The weighting number has been assigned to the solutions discussed based on the importance it has against the criteria at every instance. It is therefore important to state that these weighting numbers can further be varied in order to suite the customers at each location for all the branches of the company. This follows the fact that several factors that usually influences the performance of the company can be varying from one place to another.

From the weighted-criteria decision matrix tool it is very evident that quality control is the most important solution to the challenges that the company is facing. It has the highest total score compared to the rest. The company must therefore consider adopting better quality control measures at all stages of production of their brands. The amount of sale performance can therefore be improved tremendously by observing effective quality control measures.

Having identified the solution to the problem affecting the company as poor quality controls, the solution further has some tangible and intangible costs and benefits associated with it. These are as shown in the table below.

From the given information pertaining the company costs and benefits, the cost benefit analysis can be carried out to determine the feasibility and the payback period upon sale of company products.

As at the year 2015,

Costs

Details Cost in the year 2015

Losses incurred $ 293,000,000

Benefits

Details Cost in the year 2015

Sales obtained $ 3,500,000,000

The payback time will be,

Since the overall benefits of the company outweighs the company cost then the quality control as solution can still help in winning the confidence of the consumers. The company will achieve higher income from the sale of its products through coming up with better quality control policies and may be they are supposed to change the trade mark or the marketing name of its products so renew the reputation of the company.

REFERENCES

Rao, R. (2013). Decision making in manufacturing environment using graph theory and fuzzy multiple attribute decision making methods. London: Springer.

Totik, V. (1994).Weighted approximation with varying weight. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.