The Development of Operation Management Essay

1. What recommendations would you make to John Wolf with respect to structuring the supplier relationship process for the Wolf Motors dealership network?

Operations management refers to all levels of an organisation and how best to efficiently convene, fund, maintain and maximise its services and/or operations, both internal and external. The core goal/objective of operations management it to maximise outputs while reducing and minimising the inputs required to achieve the desired results.

Organizations large or small all strive to be successful through fostering a culture of great people, great processes, great products, and great results. Typically, three main functions play into an organization, marketing, operations, and financial accountability. Marketing generates the demand through the promotion of goods and services. Operations creates the goods, handles the movement of the goods, and ensures successful final delivery of the goods or service. The financial accountability is how the organization is doing financially concerning accounts receivable and accounts payable. Of the three, operations is arguably the most important to the success of an organization and has many key components that play into this success including operations strategies, supply chain, inventory control, and cost leadership to name a few.

James, T. (2011) defines Operations Management as the management of the processes which aid production of goods and or services. This implies that all production activities must be coordinated well to ensure a lean process of resource management is adopted.

Operations Management in an organisation is repsonsible for managing and in making decisions concerning the activities that convert inputs into outputs , that is goods and services. This covers both short term actvities as well as longer term activities to meet strategic goals. Inputs can be the raw materaials need to manufacture goods such as furniture or the computers needed to create a service like online shopping site. Operation management’s role is to make decisions to improve how operation activities function, for example, to improve the final quality of the output or to change production methods to be more efficient in terms of cost and in time.

Operations management (OM) is that phase of an organization where inputs are put into operations to acquire required output (services) without compromising on quality. In other words operations management is also described as combining and transforming various resources in the operations sub-system into value added services in line with formulated policies of the organization. (Kumar and Suresh, 2009)

Operations Management is responsible for designing, operating and improving productive systems or in layman’s terms, systems for getting work done. Operations Managers are found in all walks of life. In anything you basically do or have done there are operations managers. When you go to the store, when you buy gas, in factories, in hospitals, banks even in your government there are operation managers. They are the ones who design systems, who ensure the quality of your

Organizational functions within an organization are Sales and Marketing, production, human resources, finance, Research & development, and Purchasing etc. Each of them work together to achieve the organizational objectives. Interrelation of these function relay on the base on dependency and also the structure of organization. Relationship of these function different in each organizational structure. Interrelation of these function have some advantages and disadvantages.

Operations processes refers to the acquisition of inputs which are transformed in a business through the addition of value into outputs of goods and services. Businesses use operational processes involving inputs and transformation processes to increase efficiency and output. The operations management focuses on carefully and managing processes to produce and distribute products and services based on the nature of the business. To achieve objectives in a business, the quality of products are monitored regularly using customer services and warranties. Both Qantas and McDonalds, utilise operation process in order to gain maximum efficiency and productivity.

1. It has been said that forecasting using exponential smoothing is like driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror. What are the conditions that would have to exist for driving a car that are analogous to the assumptions made when using exponential smoothing?

Operations management focuses on managing the processes of producing and distributing products and services. Operations activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. It deals with all operations within the organization. Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations. The nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of products or services in the organization, for example, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, etc.

This paper intends to define operations management and analyze an ethics decision made by operations managers in the workplace or in a known organization.

Operations management is generally described as the planning, arrangement, and control of activities that change raw materials or an organization's input into finished products and services. The overall activities covered by operations management include the creation, development, manufacture, and distribution of products. The concept also relates to various activities such as inventory control, controlling purchases, quality control, logistics, storage, and evaluation ("Operations Management in McDonalds", n.d.). Since operations management covers the entire operations in an organization, it mainly focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of the firm's processes.

Operational management processes in a firm involves overseeing, formulating and reformulation of the operations of a business. The processes are meant to ensure efficiency in administering resources whilst ensuring there is effective management of client’s specifications and or directions. This is achieved by adding value to the firm’s processes. Such achievements are experienced when a firm embarks in directing its physical and or technical functions towards enhancing its development, production and manufacturing. These should be pre-determined and controlled by market opportunities if a company is to reach its ultimate production levels. Their realisation adds up to ensuring the future of a firm, offering operational

The operations function is important in implementing the strategy of an organisation because the business strategy only defines the long term plans for the company, whereas the operations function focuses on specific competitive priorities in order to meet the organisations long term plan. Prime Bank of Massachusetts had decided on a long term plan for the bank focusing on customer services and they needed the operations function to implement this long term plan through planning & control systems, workers and quality. Problems such as not having enough phone lines for the 24 hours customer service could cause customers to become irritated if they cannot get through on the phone and