Learn how to manage business processes to produce the products and services your customers need. Topics include product design, supply chain management, quality, inventory, and planning.
We are all familiar with the science of operations management in some way, since we all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly. Think about preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking. Certain ingredients go in at certain times. Occasionally, you fall behind or get too far ahead, jeopardizing the entire meal. And, of course, if you do not have enough ingredients, even more problems arise. All of these elements of meal preparation – purchasing ingredients, prepping the ingredients by dicing them up, mixing ingredients, boiling or baking the dish, serving, and cleaning – can be seen as parts of operations management.
In business, operations management is more complicated than preparing a family meal. There may be hundreds or thousands of participants rather than just you and your brother, wife, or grandfather cooking in the kitchen. Each participant has a specific role in the operations process; if any step is disrupted, the whole process can stall or fall apart. Smart operations managers will have contingency plans if stoppages occur. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of operations management as they apply to production and service-based operations. Completing this course will empower you to implement the concepts you have learned in your place of business. Even if you do not plan to work in operations, every department of every company has processes that must be completed; someone savvy in operations management will be able to improve just about any process.
- Unit 1: Overview of Operations Management
- Unit 2: Operations Strategy
- Unit 3: Product Design and Process Selection
- Unit 4: Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- Unit 5: Just-In-Time and Lean Systems
- Unit 6: Capacity Planning and Facility Layout
- Unit 7: Work Systems Design
- Unit 8: Inventory
- Unit 9: Quality Management
- Explain the role of operations management and the use of the transformational model in the success of manufacturing and service organizations;
- Evaluate the importance of market needs and operational capabilities (such as productivity, workflow, and quality) in formulating a business strategy that creates a sustainable competitive advantage;
- Analyze operation processes from a variety of perspectives, such as productivity, workflow, and quality;
- Discuss the goal of Supply Chain Management and its application in a variety of organizational settings;
- Apply basic design principles to determine appropriate facility location and layout;
- Explain techniques and methods for creating and evaluating work systems design;
- Identify the critical factors involved in inventory control systems; and
- Explain quality management and apply continuous quality improvement principles to operations management.