Introduction
According to Slack, Chambers & Johnston (2010), the goal of any organization whether public, private, service, industrial or retail operations is to make most effective use of its operations while ensuring that its customers are satisfied with the quality, cost, availability and even quantity of services or goods. The means to achievingthis are to efficiently produce goods and services through effective business processes, production functions and controls. There are varying measures of optimization such as in the variety of output, the degree of operational visibility to the customer, volume of the output and variation on the demand of the product and services.
The Lady Cobbler & Co. Ltd.
The Lady Cobbler has over 22 years of experience in catering for women, men and kids shoes with branches across the commercial state of Lagos. The company is one of its kinds as this sort of business is rarely neither formalizednor present on the highbrow streets According to its website (http://theladycobbler.com, n.d.), one of its services is shoe expansion i.e. increasing the size of shoes. Shoe expansion as a service has in recent times became good business as more and more working class men and women become inclined to ordering wears online, which a good percentage of the time may have size mismatch issues.
Profile of the shoe expansion service based on the 4 Vs.
Volume dimension: People who need to stretch their shoes for increased comfort require the shoe expansion service. All expansions are done the same way using the same specialized machine that allows for high volume. Although Lady Cobbler requires specialized hands in providing the service, the knowledge is easy to acquire and transfer making it is therefore easy to sell high volume of the service.
The implication is that all these make for low unit and processing costsfor the organization but maybe less rewarding for the staff, as the tasks involved
References: Bisen, V.& Srivastava, S.(2009) Production & Operation Management India : Word-Press. Kumar, S.& Suresh, N.(2009) Operations Management. New Delhi : New Age International (P) Ltd. Slack, N., Chambers, S. & Johnston, R. (2010) Operations management. 6th ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall/Financial Times. The Lady Cobber & Co. Ltd. (n.d.) official website[Online]. Available from: http://theladycobbler.com(Accessed: 9 May 2013).