A cake for Saturday: On Monday a customer comes into the High Street shop and orders a birthday cake for Saturday: a football pitch in green icing, her son's name, the number 9, and enough for 30 children.
Lena's Bakery Ltd charges $40. The cake decorator draws the design, bakes the sponge and spends about three hours on the icing. Nothing like it was made before it, and nothing like it will be made after.
This is job production: each product is made on its own, usually to the customer's own design (her specification), and the next job starts only when this one is finished. Nothing is made until the order comes in. The customer decides what the product is; the business decides how to make it.
What job production looks like
- One at a time. The decorator finishes the football cake before she starts the next order.
- Made to order. Work starts once the customer has said what she wants, so there is no stock of birthday cakes.
- Each product is different. Next week's cake may be a castle for twelve.
- Skilled people, simple tools. The skill is in the decorator's hands, not in a machine, and she does every stage herself.
- Labour-intensive. Most of the cost of each cake is hours of skilled work.
What job production gives
- A product nobody else sells. The football cake is exactly what the customer asked for.
- A higher price. Customers pay for uniqueness: $40 for a cake whose direct costs are about $14.
- High quality. One skilled person takes care over every part of one product.
- Motivated workers. The decorator makes the whole cake and meets the customer, so the work is varied and her own.
- Flexibility. The customer can change the design until the last day.
What it costs
- A high cost for each item. Three hours of skilled work go into one cake.
- Slow. One decorator finishes two or three cakes a day, so output is hard to increase quickly.
- No economies of scale. Nothing is made in bulk, because no two cakes are alike.
- Uneven work. Orders arrive one by one: some weeks the decorator is rushed, some weeks she waits.
- Skill is hard to find. A second skilled decorator would be scarce and expensive.
One-off, not small: Job production describes how the product is made, not how big the business is. A bridge, a ship or a wedding dress is job production too: one product, to one customer's specification, finished before the next begins.
So do not describe it as small-scale production. Describe it as one-off production to the customer's order.
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Two a.m. at Mill Lane: At two in the morning Priti and her six bakers start the night's bread at the Mill Lane bakehouse. The four shops need 1,450 loaves by five, in four kinds: white, wholemeal, sourdough and rye.
They do not make one loaf at a time, and they do not make all 1,450 at once. They make 500 white loaves together, then 350 wholemeal, then 350 sourdough, then 250 rye.
This is batch production: similar items are made in groups (batches). The whole batch goes through one stage together, then moves on to the next stage together, until the batch is finished. Then the equipment is set up for the next batch, which can be a different product.
One batch of 500 white loaves
Mix
The dough for all 500 loaves is mixed at once. Nothing moves on until the whole batch is mixed.
Prove
The 500 pieces of dough rest and rise together on racks.
Shape and tin
The bakers shape all 500 and drop them into the same tins.
Bake
The oven bakes 600 loaves an hour, so the 500 white loaves take 50 minutes.
Change over
The oven is reset and the tins changed before the wholemeal goes in: about 10 minutes in which the oven bakes nothing (the changeover time).
Does the night fit?: Counting oven time only: 1,450 loaves at 600 an hour take 145 minutes. Four kinds of bread means three changeovers of 10 minutes, another 30 minutes.
145 + 30 = 175 minutes, or 2 hours 55 minutes. Starting at 2 a.m., the last rye is out at 4.55, five minutes before the vans leave.
Add a fifth kind of bread and there is a fourth changeover: 185 minutes, and the vans would wait until 5.05. Every new product in a batch system costs changeover time.
Features
- Similar items made together in groups (batches)
- The whole batch passes through each stage before moving on
- Different batches can be different products
- Changeover time between one batch and the next
- Larger quantities than job production, smaller than flow
- Some variety for customers, but less than job production
Advantages
- Lower cost per item than job production: one mixing and one bake serve 500 loaves
- Variety: four breads from one bakehouse and one oven
- Flexible: batch sizes follow demand, more rye on a busy night and less on a quiet one
- The same equipment is used for every batch, so it is rarely idle for long
Disadvantages
- Changeover time: 30 minutes a night in which the oven bakes nothing
- Needs careful planning so that each batch is ready when the oven is free
- Dough and loaves wait between stages and need space on racks
- Repetitive work, which can bore staff more than job production
- A higher cost per item than flow production
Batch production sits between the other two methods. It gives Mill Lane some of the low cost of making many at once and some of the variety of making to order.
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One loaf, all day and all night: In its factory in Seren, Marovia, Goldcrust plc bakes one product: a sliced white loaf. The line never stops. It makes about 8,000 loaves an hour, 24 hours a day: 192,000 loaves a day.
Every loaf is the same size and weight, in the same bag.
This is mass/flow production (also called mass production or flow production): large numbers of one standard product made continuously on a production line (an assembly line). Each loaf moves from stage to stage; at each stage a machine or a worker does one task and passes it on. New loaves are started and finished all the time, and there is no gap between one group and the next.
Mix
machine
- Dough mixed without stopping and fed onto the line
Divide and shape
machine
- Cut into identical pieces and dropped into tins
Prove and bake
machine
- Tins ride slowly through a warm prover, then a tunnel oven
Cool, slice, bag
machine and one worker
- One worker watches the slicer; the bags are sealed by machine
What the line gives Goldcrust
- A very low cost per loaf. The $12 million line is shared across 192,000 loaves a day (economies of scale).
- Fewer, less skilled workers. Machines do the work and staff watch them, so labour is cheaper and easier to find.
- The same quality every time. Every loaf is identical, which is what a shopper buying sliced bread expects.
- Easy to make more. When demand rises, the line can run faster or on more days.
What it costs
- A huge cost before the first loaf. The line cost $12 million: flow production is capital-intensive.
- No flexibility. The line makes one loaf. A rye loaf or a birthday cake would need a different line.
- One breakdown stops everything. If the slicer jams for an hour, 8,000 loaves are lost, because every stage waits for the one before.
- Boring work. Watching the same machine for eight hours demotivates many workers.
- It needs large, steady demand. Stock must be controlled well, or unsold loaves pile up.
Flow is not a fast batch: A batch stops: 500 white loaves finish, the oven is reset, then the wholemeal goes in. A flow line never stops between products, because there is only one product.
To describe flow production, say continuous, standardised and on a line. 'It makes a lot' on its own describes batch production too.
Lena's Bakery Ltd uses two methods under one roof, and Goldcrust a third. None of them is the best method. Each suits a different kind of product.
| Job | Batch | Mass/flow | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The product | One-off, made to the customer's design | A range of similar products | One standard product |
| How many | One at a time | Groups: 250 to 500 loaves | Very large and continuous: 192,000 a day |
| Cost per item | Highest | In between | Lowest |
| Workers | Highly skilled, doing every stage | Some skill, some repetition | Few, less skilled, one task each |
| Machines | Simple tools; low start-up cost | Equipment set up again for each batch | A dedicated line; very high start-up cost |
| Here | The $40 birthday cake | Mill Lane's four breads | Goldcrust's sliced white loaf |
Why batch, not flow, at Mill Lane: Flow production suits one standard product made in huge, steady numbers. Mill Lane makes four kinds of bread, and between 1,200 and 1,450 loaves a night.
A line built for one loaf could not bake the rye, and at 8,000 loaves an hour it would finish Mill Lane's whole night in about eleven minutes and then stand idle. Batch production lets one oven make a range of similar products in turn.
The same question can be asked the other way. Marco has an idea for the birthday cakes: bake the three most popular designs (a football pitch, a castle, a unicorn) in batches of 20 and decorate them in advance. Each cake would take the decorator about one hour instead of three.
Cakes in batches would gain
- A lower cost per cake. One hour of decorating instead of three.
- Speed. Cakes wait on the shelf, ready the same day, instead of being ordered days ahead.
- More cakes. In the same hours the decorator could finish about three times as many.
They would lose
- The reason people pay $40. A cake with her son's name and the number 9 is unique; a shelf cake is not.
- Waste and space. Cakes made before anyone orders them may not sell, and they need room to store.
- Choice. Three designs, not any design the customer can think of.
Match the method to the product: Job: a one-off product, made to order, for customers who will pay for exactly what they want.
Batch: a range of similar products in medium numbers, where demand for each one changes.
Mass/flow: one standard product, in very large and steady numbers, with the money to build the line.
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How this comes up: Short questions, two marks each: state two features of batch production; describe one feature of batch production; state one advantage and one disadvantage of flow production.
In the case: describe the two operations methods a named business uses, for four, and explain why it uses batch rather than flow production, for two.
The four-mark pattern
- Name the first method. Job production.
- Describe it, in the case. Each birthday cake is made on its own, to the customer's design, after she orders it.
- Name the second method. Batch production.
- Describe it, in the case. At Mill Lane 500 white loaves are mixed, proved and baked together, then the oven is reset for the wholemeal.
Three things for each method: Name, describe, apply. A method described with nothing from the case stops at one mark. Two methods named but not described stop at two for the whole answer.
Use the case's own products. The cakes are job production and the bread is batch production because of how each is made, not because of what each costs.
Describe two operations methods used by Lena's Bakery Ltd.
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