Heirlooms have been operating in the fine linens industry for 39 years and
have become a recognised luxury company, with internationally cliental
regularly using the company and, achieving various accolades such as
becoming a Royal Warrant Holder in the UK.
This research project set out to study the production processes and
operations management strategies currently implemented by Heirlooms in
order to identify the areas within the current process causing inefficiencies
and bottlenecks.
A mixed approach was adopted for data collection, utilising both qualitative
and quantitative data through the use of interviews with employees,
observations of the entire business process and monitoring the frequency of
events and actions with daily processes. The primary theory used to analysis
the collected data was Lean Management and Six Sigma as the tools and
models within these theories allowing to visually see the inefficiencies and
bottlenecks in Heirlooms processes, the data has been displayed in the report
via the use of Voice of Customer, Value Stream Map and Pareto chart.
The analysis of data showed that although Heirlooms are a successful
company there are serval areas within the company which create
inefficiencies and bottlenecks, some of these being too much paperwork
required to fill out, losing paper, work not planned out or followed and the
main cause being lack of efficient communication
There have been six recommendations generated for Heirlooms and some of
these include the introduction of regular departmental meetings, development
and monitoring of Key Performance Indicators and a unified database across
the company. These will rectify the inefficiencies and bottlenecks created by
limiting the lack of communication between departments by ensuring updates
are communicated to employees every meeting, removing the amount of
paperwork in use, transitioning to a digitalised business and tracking and
solving products defects via KPI’s.