02-02-2016, 04:20 PM
Introduction
Caterpillar Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. The company is a leading services provider through Caterpillar Financial Services, Caterpillar Remanufacturing Services, Caterpillar Logistics Services and Progress Rail Services. With 2011 sales and revenues of $60.138 billion. Caterpillar was ranked number one in its industry and number 44 overall in the 2009Fortune 500. Caterpillar stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Caterpillar Inc. Traces its origins to the 1925 merger of the Holt Manufacturing Company and the C. L. Best Tractor Company, creating a new entity, the California based Caterpillar Tractor Company In1986, the company re-organized itself as a Delaware corporation under the current name, Caterpillar Inc. Caterpillar's headquarters are located in Peoria, Illinois, United States.
Caterpillar products and components are manufactured in 110 facilities worldwide. 51 plants are located in the United States and 59 overseas plants are located in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, and the People's Republic of China, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and Sweden. Caterpillar's historical manufacturing home is in Peoria, Illinois, which is also the location of Caterpillar's world headquarters and core research and development activities.
Caterpillar developed more efficient corporate structure to better position the company to support and serve its customers. The new structure will consolidate the number of traditional corporate divisions, reducing the number from 32 to 29. These changes will also result in a number of new responsibilities for some vice presidents.
"In response to the recession of late 2008 and 2009, Caterpillar made significant reductions to our workforce, while also reducing costs across the company," Oberhelman said. "Our response to the recession helped reveal the opportunity to change Caterpillar's structure by also reducing the number of divisions and group presidents. I'm proud to work for the global leader in our industry, but we cannot take our leadership position for granted. The only way we can maintain our leadership position is by helping our customers be more successful with us than they can be working with anyone else. This new structure will make our company and our people more responsive, more decisive and more accountable."
Operational Practices:
Caterpillar production system (cps) fuels caterpillar’s operations management strategy. The key operations processes of the firm, powered by cps include:
• Product design: one of the factors for caterpillar’s dominance over its rivals include the strength in product design. There is constant innovation in this area to ensure that customer needs and environmental needs are fully satisfied.
• Demand management: the demand management process delivers integrated and synchronized value chain supply-and-demand plans that maximize service levels and profit throughout the band of demand. It delivers one consensus, an unbiased forecast and supply plan that prepares for the inherent forecast variation, and enables proactive actions to be taken in place of reactive actions.
• Quality management: the quality management process enables facilities to proactively control quality. It delivers defect-free products and services to customers and internal process partners.
• Process planning: process planning specifies the procedures, bill of material and resources needed to transform product design into products.
• Supply chain / materials management (including outsourcing and procurement): the supply chain / materials management process ensures consistent delivery of the right part, to the right place, at the right time, at the right quantity, at the right cost, at the right quality every single time.
• Lean systems: caterpillar’s lean systems drive the execution of cps processes on the production floor — including all processes involved in production from receiving raw materials at the facility to delivering the finished product to the customer.
• Capability building / training: capability building relentlessly pursues bringing cat’s workplace values to life and delivers on the methodology, principles and tools of cps. As an enabling process of cps, capability building provides the necessary skills development, learning opportunities and coaching for the employees of team caterpillar.
Operations Management:
Caterpillar Inc. has adopted a unique management concept by dividing their departmentsinto main departments and having an Operations research and evaluation unit for each of theirmain departments.The caterpillar management system define their different departments and the employees andtasks for those departments clearly with a unique system of measuring the effectiveness of theircurrent operations, their employee value and the market respond for their products and howmuch this department contribute to the product and the whole existence of Caterpillar Inc.