Operational Management

Introduction

Operations management is concerned with the production and delivery of goods and services. It encompasses the design of the products and processes, the planning and execution of production, and acquisition and deployment of resources. Efficient operations can provide a firm with major competitive advantages, since the ability to respond to consumer and market requirements quickly, at low coast, and with high quality, is vital for sustained profitability and growth.

The course aims to familiarize you with the problems and issues confronting operations managers and provide you with concepts, insights and tools to deal with these issues in order to gain competitive advantage through operations.

We will see how different business strategies require different business processes, and vice versa, how different operational capabilities allow and support different strategies to gain competitive advantage. A process view of operations will be used to analyze different key operational dimensions such as capacity management, cycle time management, supply chain and logistics management, and quality management. And, we will connect to recent development such as lean or world-class manufacturing, just-in-time operations, time-based competition and business re-engineering.

Course content

• Overview the course, Operations management defined; linking operations to corporate strategy
• Business process re-engineering: a business management strategy focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization.
• Identification and management of bottlenecks
• Business process re-engineering: a business management strategy focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization.
• The "Beer Game"
• Waiting line models: Why queues form, introduction of queuing models, trade-offs and managerial insights 
• The "Outsourcing Game"
• Classification of Products: functional and innovative products
• Inventory management: the planning and controlling of inventories in order to meet the competitive priorities of the organization.

2 of the teaching hours in this course are dedicated to CSR, ethics, social and environmental issues.