Operations Management is everything concerned with strategising the following organisational functions that help improve the competitiveness of organisations, its productivity and hence the profitability of organisations.
The main objective of any operations function is to improve the value delivered to the customer during the useful life of the product or service and its successful withdrawal and environmentally safe disposal. The more important organisational functions are given below.
- Product and service Design
- Bringing Innovation in different aspects of products and service
- Job design
- Scheduling
- Inventory management
- Capacity management
- Facilities management
- Quality management
- Supply Chain Management
- Project Management
- Operations Optimisation using Lean Operations, Six Sigma, Business Process Re-engineering
- Data Management using ERP, Data Analysis, Big Data
- Returns Management
- Environmental sustainability
- Understanding applicability of Industry 4.0 concepts like 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Metaverse, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Blockchains etc.
There is no other management branch that has so much of impact on the functioning of organisations like Operations Management. If one looks deeper into it, we find Operations management is all about controlling the major aspects of organisations other than creating customer awareness, financial aspects and maximising employee creativity and potential.
Operations Managers across industry lose their sleep over many issues and these primarily are given here -
- Concerned over productivity issues, unable to produce or ship the promised quantity to the customers gives many operations managers sleepless nights
- Quality problems hound operations managers as they get customer reports and complaints incessantly in case of these issues. Need to improve process quality is a matter of great concern for them
- Thoughts about value delivery, customer satisfaction, haunts the managers as customer issues and problems make or break an operations professional's career
- With the ever increasing pressure to manage data more efficiently, IT is taken for granted in modern organisations. A manager who is about to deploy a new enterprise-wide application can never get peace of mind till the deployment is successful and complete across the organisation and its geographically dispersed facilities
- Sending files and reports on time is a part of the monitoring process that can often come in the way of work and wreak havoc among people. Excessive amount of documentation and reporting, operations professionals often fail or delay in this area
- Since operations functions cuts across departments on the shop floor, maintaining proper coordination between departments is vital to the successful functioning of the organisation. Unresolved conflicts between departments often result in low output and longer down times.
- Choosing the right people to carry out the tasks on the shop floor. Difficulty recruiting the right talent can be really challenging at times.
- Not having the right suppliers / vendors for raw materials and spare parts inventory often results
With the overriding influence of electronic channels in today's commercial world, the importance of operations is increasing day by day.
George.
