Operations 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. 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.

This course’s first goal is to introduce the strategic and operational challenges that operations managers are confronted with, and provide you with frameworks to critically understand and deal with those challenges. For example, we will discuss process choice strategies, fundamental principles of quality management and lean systems, business process improvement, capacity strategy and supply chain management. The second goal of this course is to introduce you process analysis and improvement tools. We will utilize basic analysis techniques to study process capacity and bottlenecks, evaluate the impact of process variability, and explore the fundamental principles of inventory management.

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
• 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.
• The "Outsourcing Game"