What Is Operations Management

Operations Management

Manish Agrawal

Operations Managers  Plan, direct or coordinate the operations of a company or an organization.  They decide how a company's facilities should be laid out, formulate policies, control inventory and distribution, and create employee schedules, among other duties.  the duties of an operations manager may overlap the duties of chief executive officer.

What do Operations Managers do? • Within an operation first listing of main activities then operations manager must manage.     

role demands planning decisions coordination systems

Operations as a system Demanding environment

Materials Labour Capital Information

Transformation (Conversion) Process

Boundary management

Energy

Boundary management

Technology

Feedback (information) control over process inputs & technology

Goods & Services

Operations Management Business strategy Operations Strategy Mission

Internal & external analysis

Distinctive Competence Objectives cost, quality, flexibility, delivery

Functional strategies: marketing, finance, engineering, staff & information systems

Policies: process, quality systems, capacity,& inventory

Consistent decisions

Results

Roles of Operations Manager Marketers - emphasises Quality Dependability Range

Innovator Quality Product/service performance Speed New prod. Dev.

Maintainer - emphasises Schedule Dependability Quality Price/cost

Reorganiser Quality Product/service performance Flexibility Speed

Traditional

Enhanced

Strategic change involves enhancing the operation’s infrastructure

Enhanced Basic

Customer service criteria

Strategic change involves re-structuring, re-engineering

Ops Mgt - a complex interfacing role • thinkers + doers + decision-takers • many people to be managed + 70% of assets • largest budget areas/cost centres • direct costs & overheads, process and timeoriented • measurable/controllable measures of progress + outputs (product, volume, time, Money, wastage, labour).

Ops Mgt… •work-flow and cash-flow •short-terms (time constraints & dependencies) •cost of a day’s lost production vs. long-term perspectives •hard-edged management of product & process technology •information sub-systems to control the whole •logistics and dispersed operations

Quality of Ops Man • Operations managers need a broad range of skills, including a keen understanding of people and processes. Most importantly, operations managers should enjoy working with people– talking about projects and solving problems in teams. They should also possess: • Strong leadership ability • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills • Strong interpersonal communication skills