Minit Lube Essay

MINIT-LUBE, INC.

1. (a) What constitutes the mission of Minit-Lube?
To provide economical preventive maintenance and interior auto cleaning, primarily to vehicles owned by individuals (as opposed to business), in the U.S.

2. (b) How does the Minit-Lube Strategy provide competitive advantage?

Minit-Lube’s approach to these 10 decisions includes:

Product Design: A narrow product strategy could be defined as “lubricating automobiles” that allows the subsequent development of more focused and efficient operations (more in Chapter 5).

Quality Strategy: Because of limited task variety, high repetition, good training, and good manuals, quality should be relatively easy to maintain.

Process Strategy: The process strategy allows employees and capital investment to focus on doing this mission well, rather than trying to be a “general purpose” garage or gas station.

Location Strategy: Facilities are usually located near residential areas.

Layout Strategy: The three bays are designed specifically for lubrication and vacuuming tasks to minimize wasted movement on the part of the employees and to contribute to the speedier service.

Supply Chain Strategy: Purchasing is facilitated by negotiation of large purchases and custom packaging.

Human Resources Strategy: Human resources strategy focuses on hiring a few employees with limited skills and training them in a limited number of tasks during the performance of which they can be closely supervised.

Inventory: Inventory investment should be relatively low, and they should expect a high turnover.

Scheduling: Scheduling is quite straightforward with similar times for most cars. Once volume and fluctuation in volume are determined, scheduling should be very direct—assisting both staffing and customer relations.

Maintenance: There is relative little equipment to