2013
University of South Australia
RUI SHEN 110024814
6/4/2013

Alpha Reminiscent Cars Expansion
12 Team Approach or Robotic Approach?

Introduction
Alpha Reminiscent Cars (ARC) used to be a small factory-based company. Until now it still maintains the hand assembled and hand-crafted tradition. In the last decade, the gradually increasing demand for the new-look-reminiscent-of-an-old style cars urged the company had tripled in size, twice shifting to larger premises and upgrading equipment and staff numbers. However, ARC’s ability still cannot satisfy the customer demand as the waiting list has lined up for six years. It seems that the expansion is currently the most urgent task for the company. At present, the company has two feasible approaches for expansion. One is the 12 team approach which doubled the workforce size of the original 6 teams. Another one is the assembly-line robotic approach which would introduce the computer-based robotics to the three worksites. Therefore, the purpose of this report is to analysis the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches separately, especially the issues of 12 team approach related to ARC’s expansion and finally summarise which approach would be better for ARC to maintain or increase profit and also make its employees happy.

Team Approach
According to Mohrman & Quam (2000), ‘Teams are a common design fixture in today’s organisations.’ Organizations which are using teams to perform their core work and provide value to customers are called as the team-based organisation. A team-based organisational structure has autonomous work teams operating in parallel such that each team performs its specific duties in the organisational work process. The organisations see teams as a better way of doing business are based on the two main reasons that team can empower employees to more fully contribute and to