Operations Management

‘Discuss the role and importance of operations management in the context of the organization that you have chosen.’ 2010 Cohert

Introduction

What is Operations Management?

• “Operations management is the activity of managing the resources which are devoted to the production and delivery of products and services”. It is one of the core functions of any business, although it may not be called operations management in some industries.

• Operations management is con concerned with managing processes. And all processes have internal customers and suppliers. But all management functions also have processes. Therefore, operations management has relevance for all managers.

Why is operations management important in all types of organization?

• Operations management uses the organization’s resources to create outputs that fulfill defined market requirements. This is the fundamental of any type of enterprise.

• Operations management’s increasingly important because today’s business environment requires new thinking from operations managers.

What is the input-transformation-output process?

• All operations can be modeled as input-transformation-output processes. They all have inputs of transforming resources, which are usually divided into ‘facilities’ and ‘staff’ and transformed resources, which are some mixtures of materials, information and customers.

• Few operations produce only products or only services. Most produce some mixture of tangible goods or products and less tangible services.

What is the process hierarchy?

• All operations are part of a larger supply network which, through the individual contributions of each operation, satisfies the end-customer requirements.

• All operations are made up of processes that form a network or internal customer-supplier relationships within the operation.

• End-to end business processes that satisfy customer needs often cut across functionality based processes.

How do operations processes have different...