Good And Service Design Of Cemex Company - Critical Assessment

Principles of Good and Service Design

Discuss about the Geopolymer Pastes in Comparison to Ordinary.

Whenever a company is planning on producing a new service or/and good, there are a number of principles that it ought to take into consideration so as to reach a perfect design: identify the needs and wants of the customers, refine the existing goods and services, come up with new goods and services, convey eminence goals, formulate the cost of the targets, build and examine prototypes, write down the specifications, then convert the goods and services specifications into process specification. Good design syndicates ergonomics with business and product knowledge in order to come up with concepts and ideas, and convert them into physically usable services or objects (Ashby & Johnson, 2013). Moreover, it incorporates activities like conception, manufacture and testing of the product. On the other hand, service design is all about planning and organizing people material and communication components with an aim to improve service delivery (Curedale, 2013). It entails an interaction between the customers and their service provider. The degree of customer contact and the degree of variation in requirements are a major determinant of the nature the service. By interacting with a customer frequently, the opportunity of selling increases. This report highlights the corresponding good and service design adopted by Cemex company in its production and sale of cement. It critically assesses the limitations of good and service design associated with the aforementioned company.

Cemex is a Mexican constructional organization which operates globally. It delivers reliable services and high-quality products to its customers in over 50 countries globally. Cemex is well known for its efficiency in advancements, innovative building solutions and its purpose to promote a sustainable future to all its clients (O'Neal, 2015). Cemex has adopted the Corporate Ecosystem Services Review to come up with new means of improving quarry rehabilitation and increase the company’s returns on investments thereof. The goods production system was found to be wanting. The company applied Ecosystem Services Review on a hundred hectares’ gravel pit located at the French Loire River Basin which was affected by its operation (Feiz, 2011). Farming and forestry have been compromised in this area where conversion of cropland to quarry affects crop production greatly as well as removal of top soil and vegetation during quarrying process.

Use of fresh water in the production process is a major input. Despite the fact that Cemex’s water use is usually fared in a closed-loop system, water is still a necessity to the site. The company’s quarrying activities involves digging below the water table thus disrupting water flows and timings when the gravel pit fills with water and forms lakes in the long run (Mittermeier & Mittermeier, 2010). The production line includes usage of diesel quarrying equipment which have an adverse effect on the climate. Release of fumes from these diesel-powered engines destabilizes the environment by increasing the rate of global warming. Moreover, the quarrying process has contributed to a loss in biodiversity. The denuded land is usually prone to weedy invasive species thus the demise.

Cemex Company Overview

In the service sector, Cemex has not been able to listen to the needs and understanding the challenges faced by their clients. Their commercial policies and processes are still under redesign with an aim of creating a better experience for their customers. Moreover, the company does not provide information to its shareholders on bonus structures and individual executive salary. This makes it impossible for investors to establish the steps needed for the company to link up executive pay to the performance of the company.

Cemex exercises a centralized management system thus its inability to make decisions from different locations. Its branches located in different countries have to file their issues to Mexico so that the executives can assess them. This results to low customer satisfaction due to a lack of timely response to situations (Macintosh & Quattrone, 2010). In some of the organization’s branches, employees are not fully motivated into their job. This is a major concern to the organization as corresponding low service delivery is experienced where employees don’t bother attending to complaints with the required seriousness. Lack of advanced technology in some of its branches hinder quality service delivery to its customers. It happens that where information technology is advanced, these systems are vulnerable to disruption and damage caused by either electronic or physical break-ins, power outages, catastrophic events, network failure, natural disasters, unauthorized access, malware, or even cyber-attacks (Lovelock, 2011). However, this does not imply that the whole good and service system of Cemex is flawy. The company has many policies towards improving their customer service as well as the quality of their products.

The good and service design of Cemex is constrained by various factors for it to actualize. During provision of its services, the economic conditions exhibited by the different countries where they operate holds an effect on their financial condition, prospects, business and ultimate results. The currency of Mexico has depreciated thus causing inflation in the country. High prices of goods and services in Mexico leads to an increase in the price of exports. Countries like United States of America, where Cemex exports most of its products, feel a pinch when purchasing its products due to high prices. This would drive them to turning to alternatives for the same products and services at a lower price. Considering the economic capability of their market countries, poor economies pose low returns by the fact that most of their products are not purchased due to low construction activities (Marx, 2010).

Constraints to Good and Service Design of Cemex Company

Political uncertainty happens to be another constraint to the operations of the organization. social instabilities of some countries affect the sale of their goods and services. Protests and demonstrations create an unfavourable business environment for them to operate (Kannan & Koehler-Geib, 2011). The markets that Cemex operates are highly competitive since there are operated by a lot of well established companies which hold recognized brand names. These companies produce new products now and then into the market thus the need for Cemex to integrate innovative ideas to maintain its market competitiveness.

Cemex is affected by laws and regulations upheld by the countries where they operate. These laws and regulations make them vulnerable to the risk of potential liabilities and costs such as fines and legal sanctions, remediation costs, payment of compensation fee to third parties, as well as reputation damage. The production processes of Cemex consumes high amounts of fuel and power. Increase in prices of fuel by the Arab countries makes production cost expensive thus a resultant high prices of the company’s products and services. Traditional fuels are expensive to apply as alternatives.

Some countries where Cemex operates have scarcity of natural resources such as water thus poor results in its operations. Poor climates and government rationing of water in these countries are a factor. As reported before, the operations of Cemex require a lot of water and thus lack of the same could prove to be detrimental.

Cemex has yet to adopt the 3D Concrete Printing technology compared to a company like Swinburne in Australia. Swinburne uses geopolymers and Portland cement as binders in the 3D printers (McLellan, Williams, Lay, Van Riessen & Corder, 2011). 3D concrete printing is quite fascinating due to its ability to combine both material and digital technologies so as to allow for free-form construction thus disregarding formwork usage. Cemex has continued to use the convectional approach whereby it casts concrete into mould. The construction adopted by 3D printing incorporates layer-by-layer material addition thus offering the aptitude to come up with components that are too expensive or otherwise impossible to build (Shaikh, 2017). The good design of Cemex remains to be constrained to rectilinear designs as a result of their formwork systems’ requirements.

3D printing has a major impact on the quality control due to the ability of machines to perform repetitive tasks better and at a higher accuracy compared to human beings (Malaeb et al., 2015). The machine works by using cement materials in conjunction with fine aggregates to come up with 3D structures.

Conclusion

A service design that purposes to attend to the needs of the customers greatly lead to the success of the organization. when customers are satisfied with the services provided by a certain institution, they will feel free to purchase its products. Likewise, goods that are efficient and effective are likely to be marketable. No one would want to purchase products of low quality since they would be harmful to a certain project in the long run.  Cement in particular ought to be of good quality as it involves construction of infrastructure for use by human beings. Poor construction would endanger the lives of the masses due to a high probability of collapsing.

References

Ashby, M. F., & Johnson, K. (2013). Materials and design: the art and science of material selection in product design. Butterworth-Heinemann.

Curedale, R. (2013). Service Design: 250 essential methods. Design Community College.

Feiz, R. (2011). Improving climate performance of cement production. Developing an assessment framework and applying it to a CEMEX cement production cluster in Germany(Doctoral dissertation, Thesis Report). Suecia: Linkoping University.[Links]).

Kannan, P., & Koehler-Geib, F. R. I. T. Z. I. (2011). Uncertainity and Contagion. Financial Contagion: The Viral Threat to the Wealth of Nations, 21-28.

Lovelock, C. (2011). Services marketing: People, technology, strategy. Pearson Education India.

Macintosh, N. B., & Quattrone, P. (2010). Management accounting and control systems: An organizational and sociological approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Malaeb, Z., Hachem, H., Tourbah, A., Maalouf, T., Zarwi, N. E., & Hamzeh, F. (2015). 3D Concrete Printing: Machine and mix design. International Journal of Civil Engineering, 6(6), 14-22.

Marx, K. (2010). A contribution to the critique of political economy. In Marx Today (pp. 91-94). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

McLellan, B. C., Williams, R. P., Lay, J., Van Riessen, A., & Corder, G. D. (2011). Costs and carbon emissions for geopolymer pastes in comparison to ordinary portland cement. Journal of cleaner production, 19(9-10), 1080-1090.

Mittermeier, R. A., & Mittermeier, C. G. (2010). Fresh Water: The Essence of Life. CEMEX.

O'Neal, D. L. (2015). Chemostratigraphic and depositional characterization of the Niobrara Formation, CEMEX Quarry, Lyons, CO. Colorado School of Mines.

Shaikh, M. (2017). 3D printer.