Operations management is a science with which we are all, in some capacity, familiar. We all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly. Think about the process of preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking. Certain ingredients go in at certain times.
Operations management is a science with which we are all, in some capacity, familiar. We all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly. Think about the process of preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking. Certain ingredients go in at certain times. Occasionally, you fall behind or get too far ahead, jeopardizing the entire meal. And, of course, if you find that you do not have enough ingredients, even more problems arise. All of these elements of meal preparation—purchasing ingredients, prepping the ingredients by dicing them up, mixing ingredients together, boiling or baking the dish, serving, and cleaning—can be seen as parts of operations management.
In the realm of business, operations management is more complicated than preparing a family meal. There may be hundreds or thousands of participants rather than just you and your brother or wife or grandfather cooking in the kitchen. Each participant has a specific role in the operations process; if any step of the process is disrupted, the whole process can stall or fall apart. Smart operations managers will have contingency plans in the event that stoppages occur.
In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of operations management as they apply to both production and service-based operations. Successful completion of this course will empower you to implement the concepts you have learned in your place of business. Even if you do not plan to work in operations, every department of every company has processes that must be completed; someone savvy with operations management will be able to improve just about any process.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
Explain the role of operations and its relationship with the other functional areas of a business organization.
Analyze operation processes from a variety of perspectives such as productivity, workflow, and quality.
Apply the “Transformation Model” as a construct for understanding the relationship between the inputs, processes, and outputs of an organization.
Explain techniques and methodologies for managing an organization’s productive resources.
Apply basic design principles to determine appropriate facility location and layout.
Explain quality management and apply quality management principles to continuous improvement in operations management.
Discuss the goal of Supply Chain Management and its application in a variety of organizational settings.
Identify the critical factors involved in inventory control systems.
Identify the operational processes in the student’s own organization.
