Facilities Analysis

Facilities management is an integrated process of ensuring efficiency, safety, functionality, and comfort in the production environment. Facilities management integrates the places, people, technology, and processes to ensure adequate production capability and ability to meet demand capacity. This part of the project aims to evaluate the facilities management at Zara. The paper will evaluate the Zara production plants, their physical location, the technology and equipment resources used by the company, and the security and inventory control systems implemented by the company. Hire our assignment writing services in case your assignment is devastating you.

Location Zara’s Facilities

Zara has its own production facilities equipped with the technology and machinery needed to produce fashion items. The company has several production plants located in Asian countries like China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Zara strategically selected these locations for its clothing production because of the low labor cost in these areas. According to Reid and Sanders (2016), one of the factors that influence facility location decisions is the proximity to labor. Companies choose locations where they can easily access the labor required for effective production at an affordable cost. This is one of the main factors that influenced Zara’s decision to have its stores in Asian countries. Asian countries are known to be target production locations because of the easily accessible cheap labor. Secondly, Zara’s facilities are located in Asia because of its proximity to the suppliers. Zara sources for its fabrics mainly from China and Europe. With the production facilities mainly in Asia, the company can easily move the raw materials to the production plants to simplify the supply chain processes.

Zara’s choice of locations for its facilities has cost-effectiveness as the main advantage. The company gets to produce at lower costs than in Western countries. It also spends fewer resources on transporting the raw materials to the production plants. However, the disadvantage is the high costs of transporting the produced goods to various locations across the world. Zara has stores in over 90 countries in all continents. With production only centralized in one area, the company must develop a dynamic distribution structure to get the products to the stores quickly. This adds to the distribution costs of the company.

Physical Condition and Internal Environment

The design of the physical environment of a company’s facilities is essential for production efficiencies. Failure to develop an efficient production design leads to costly inefficiencies, which make operations and management more expensive (Reid & Sanders, 2016). The physical condition of Zara’s facilities is made to facilitate the quality production of a large number of products.

Zara uses a process layout. A process layout is a physical layout characterized by an arrangement of equipment and resources based on their function. Related functions are placed closer to each other to facilitate production efficiency and minimize wastage in the movement of products from one production stage to another (Wild, 2017). The process layout creates a flow to facilitate an effective production process.

Zara’s facilities have a design department where the initial style sketches are developed. From this department, they are sent to the actual manufacturing department where the clothing is made. The facilities then have warehouses where the finished products are stored, awaiting distribution to the various retail stores across the world. This layout is effective for Zara because it facilitates the flow of items from the design to the retail area. Efficiency is improved when the company can focus on one production part at a time before moving to a subsequent one.

Technology and Equipment

Zara uses technology and equipment to speed up the production process and maintain product quality. One of the technologies used by the company is simulation, where the company uses computer software to create a realistic representation of its developed designs. Simulation enables the company to get a realistic view of the looks they come up with to determine how well they will be received in the market. In the main clothing production, the company uses fabric cutting and sewing machines to make the process faster, more efficient, and uniform in terms of quality. The technologies used by Zara help to make the design, cutting, and stitching processes more effective, thus enabling the company to produce large amounts quickly.

Security and Inventory Control Systems

Zara uses several techniques of inventory control. One of the strategies used is accurate forecasting. Zara determines its production capacity based on market analysis to forecast the demand needs. Therefore, it ensures that production falls within the right demand. The data acquired from the market is used to determine the right economic order quantity (EOQ). EOQ is the order quantity that minimizes the total inventory costs (Stevenson, Hojati, & Cao, 2007). Therefore, it helps to make inventory management cost-efficient. The benefit of this strategy is that it prevents wastage of inventory. This is especially important for Zara because the company’s demand for new designs changes every few weeks; thus, they need to produce just enough to change store inventories without wastage.

References

Reid, R. D., & Sanders, N. R. (2016). Operations Management, Binder Ready Version: An Integrated Approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Stevenson, W. J., Hojati, M., & Cao, J. (2007). Operations management (Vol. 8). Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Wild, T. (2017). Best practice in inventory management. Routledge.

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