The 10 Operations Management Decisions in NOKIA firm
1. Service, product design
Due to the always and fast changing market trends, Nokia always tries to make their
products as appropriate and attractive for all of their customers as possible. There is a high
consumer taste divergence, because some of the costumes want high tech phones for
business areas and others prefer fashioned and modern designed phones. Nowadays
people also look for experience and not just technology and so Nokia produced more and
more different models to fulfill the needs of the customer. In future, they even will make
more personalized, so-called ”Me phones”.
Nokia is always trying hard to have the best service and the best products for their
customers.
2. Quality management
Nokia tries to combine the highest quality level with the prices which are accepted by the
customers.
3. Process, capacity design
Nokia always has to be really competitive and launch new products as fast as possible to
fulfill the needs of the customer. That can only come true with a good Research and
Development Department, which Nokia decentralized in eleven countries all over the
world.
4. Location
The company Nokia is situated in Oulu, a town in the middle of Finland. One reason of
the success of the company nowadays is that at its beginnings the teleoperator market in
Finland was not concentrated to only one national company like in many other European
countries, which means that there were more competition. Nokia had an incentive to be
more innovative.
Another aspect is that the Oulu University department of engineering played a central role
in the developement of Nokia technology.
Today in Oulo there is an important IT-cluster in a global level (Oulu Technology
Village), because Nokia atrackted a lot of other companies to settle down there as well.
Today Nokia has many production stations all over the world and even sells their products
in many different countries. Especially fast-growing markets like China and India get
more and more important to the firm.
5. Layout design
Nokia has produced a variety of different mobile phones with different designs. Eg: Prada
phone, n-gage, …
6. Human resources, job design
“The Nokia way”: To foster innovation, Nokia makes hard efforts to promote teamwork
and individual responsability in the company. The key to success is diversity, which
increased creativity, mirrored market place, improved attraction and retention of human
resources. Nokia is a melting pot of people and gives the employees a change to work at
an international level. When employees in the company are satisfied, they make ”good
products” and thus also costumers will get satisfied. The keywords considering that are
trust, cooperation, sharing, openness, networking, humanity, respect, customer
friendliness and so on.
Nokia’s secret are flat team organisations and working with cross-functional teams, which
is a group of employees from various functional areas of the organization – research,
engineering, marketing, finance. human resources, and operations, for example – who are
all focused on a specific objective and are responsible to work as a team to improve
coordination and innovation across divisions and resolve mutual problems.
One example for that is Nokia India, where Nokia HR department closely tracks every
employee's progress. Every September, Nokia employees across mobile phones, networks
and two R&D divisions set up teams comprising 6-8 employees. Each of these crossfunctional teams has employees from marketing, sales and logistics, who would already
have submitted a performance rating of themselves, the company, the division and so on,
on various parameters. The teams are told to formulate an action plan and improve on the
parameters with the lowest scores. The HR department coordinates this exercise and
reviews progress every quarter.
All in all, Nokia has strong networks with suppliers and research institutes and very often
teams are multinational and operate mainly virtually. It is clear that the teams and their
new product development projects contribute a lot to the success of the product, thus they
are really important to the firm.
7. Supply-chain management
Nokia gives a lot of attention to logistics optimation like production costs and flexible
manufacturing. The company is strong in low cost models as well as high end products.
The plants are in Brazil, China, Finland, India, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, the Republic
of Korea and UK. A new plant will be opened in Romania.
Nokia maintains a flexible global manufacturing network and quickly responses to the
demands of a good logisticsystem:
• No inventories (moved to suppliers)
• Highly automatized production
• Focus on ITC systems and production platform flexibility
• Stong supplier relationships (eg phone cover manufacturer deliveres
just on 4 hour notice) – high trust
8. Inventory management
The comprehensive and powerful inventory management engine from Nokia Siemens
Networks automates standard processes such as planning, fault resolution, customer care,
provisioning and network management. It increases customer satisfaction and delivers
quicker return on investment by reducing deployment risk and roll-out time.
9. Scheduling
Due to the fact that customer tastes wary and change quicky, the product life cycles are
getting shorter and shorter. Nokia has to be sure that it can segure product extensions and
quick response to the needs of the target market.
10. Maintenance
To stay alive and maintain the success of the company, Nokia considers the client and fast
reactions to the speed of the changing market as the keys.
Nowadays they focus on Asia and BRIC-countries (Brasil, Russia, China and India
getting stronger), because there is a great potential market. Even if Nokia is the market
leader, it should not stop thinking in improving their products and services.
They also put attention to new technologies and set standards deeper to Internet and
wireless innovations. New partners like Siemens are also really important for the firm and
especially concerning smart phones competition will become even harder (eg. RIM,
Apple, Windows based smartphones…).