UK food market

M&S is one of the UK's leading retailers, with over 15. 8 million people visiting M;S's stores each week. M&S offer stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, as well as outstanding quality food, responsibly sourced from around 2,000 suppliers around the world. M&S employ over 75,000 people, in the UK and abroad, and have around 520 UK stores, as well as an expanding international business. In 2006/07, M&S recorded sales of  8. 6bn and profit before tax of 965. 2m. M&S are the UK's largest clothing retailer with a market share of 11. 1%. M;S also have a 4. 3% share of the UK food market.

Almost all the clothing, food and home products M;S sell are own-brand. Marks and Spencer Group plc is a public limited company, listed on the London Stock Exchange, with around 230,000 shareholders. M;S principal trade associations are with the Confederation of British Industry and the British Retail Consortium and founding members of Business in the Community.

In 1998 M;S became the first British retailer to make a pre-tax profit of over i?? 1 billion, though a few years later it plunged into a crisis which lasted for several years. As of 2007, it is growing again and rapidly increasing profitability.

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In 2006, M;S opened a Technology Department in 13 flagship stores, and a there is a wide selection of Technology goods in other large stores, which have Home departments. The plan to return M;S to growth has remained the same over the last three years. This paid off in 2006/07 with strong results across the business. M;S job now is to consolidate this progress as we move towards achieving growth for the long term. M;S are confident they can do this, but the year ahead is undoubtedly a critical one for them.

Under this controversy part M;S playing a smooth role, just because of it strong marketing strategy and as well actionable management team. The terminology volume Vs verity M;S successfully facing batch production and as well project or jobbing production. But typically the store drop a line with batch production, and in the jobbing production it depends on the customer demand and wants here the store try to get customer satisfaction. In operation volume and variety dimension have implications for the cost of creation the products or services.

High volume, low variety, low variation and low customer contact help to keep processing cost down. Conversely, low volume, high variety, high variation and high customer contact generally carry some kind of cost penalty for the operation. To some extent the position of an operation in those dimensions is determined by the demand of the market it is serving (Slack N. et al, 2004). Volume has important implications for the M;S operations are organized. Their volume of operation in every sector is very high. On the other hand the variety their production is low.

M;S has always set itself high quality, social, environmental and ethical standards but we have not always communicated these values and achievements effectively. This may have been less important in the past but today we know that our customers want more information about how we do business and increasingly they want us to help them take action themselves. These considerations are now an important part of how customers judge the quality of the goods they buy. This was why we launched our 'Look behind the label' marketing campaign in January 2006.

The campaign talked about the lengths we go to on issues such as sustainable fishing, animal welfare, healthy eating and 'Fair trade'. The response to the campaign was encouraging, but customers let us know that they wanted to understand our overall approach and for us to take action and lead on the key issues. We know that we don't have all the answers but we're committed to driving the business forward in a way that benefits everyone, now and in the future. Question: Thoroughly examine the link between the organization and customer and the nature of the transformation process (input-output model) that consists of the operating system.

You should access the relevance of five performance objectives as well as the current operation strategy of the organization. Operations management is concerned with managing the overall business operations. All operations produce goods and services by managing these processes to change the state or condition of something to produce outputs. Operations processes take in a set of input resources which are than used to transform something or are transformed themselves, into outputs of goods and services which satisfy customer needs.

All operations conform to this general input-transformation-output model. M;S are selling their product to the customer and try to satisfy the customers needs. This is the services that they are offering to their customer. To offer this service effectively and efficiently, they need to manage a lot of functions which call operational function. The figure below shows the transformation process model of Marks ; Spencer (M;S) which describes the nature of operation process of the company. Input Transformation Output Input - out put model of Marks ; Spencer (M;S)

In the retail business operation the customers are the part of input and output as well because, the staff and the facilities of the company transform the actual consumer themselves. And here the operation is satisfy them by giving best customer service. Normally there are two types of input resources in transformation process. One is transformed resources and another one is transforming resources. The first one is the mixture of materials, information, and customer. Sometimes one of these is dominant in an operation (Slack N.

et al, 2004). M;S now outsourcing their product from all over the world and they supply them to their all stores as their demand. For example, for clothing m;s chose asian subcontinent such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. And for food they chose china, Europe. M;S offer stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, as well as outstanding quality food, responsibly sourced from around 2,000 suppliers around the world. After that M;S transform their product and services to satisfy their actual customer.

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