Chapter 1: Intro. to Operations Management Flashcards
Q: What is the primary responsibility of the finance function?
A: Managing cash flow, current assets, and capital investments.
Q: What is marketing responsible for?
A: Sales, generating customer demand, and understanding customer wants and needs.
Q: What is operations management (OM)?
A: The business function that plans, organizes, coordinates, and controls the resources needed to produce a company’s goods and services.
Q: What resources does operations management involve managing?
A: People, equipment, technology, information, and other resources.
Q: What does operations management transform?
A: Organizational inputs into outputs.
Q: What are examples of inputs in operations management?
A: Human resources, facilities and processes, materials, technology, and information.
Q: What is the role of operations management in producing goods and services?
A: Transforming inputs into finished products.
Q: What is operations management responsible for organizing?
A: Resources, schedules, equipment, facilities, controlling quality, and job/work design to complete a final product.
Q: What is value added in operations management?
A: The net increase between the final value of a product and the value of all the inputs.
Q: What are activities that do not add value considered?
A: Waste.
Q: What are key characteristics of services?
A: Intangible product, cannot be inventoried, high customer contact, labor-intensive, short response time.
Q: What are key characteristics of manufacturing?
A: Tangible product, can be inventoried, low customer contact, capital-intensive, longer response time.
Q: What does forecasting ask?
A: “What will the demand be?”
Q: How does forecasting help in operations management?
A: It helps determine how many people to hire to meet demand for goods.
Q: What do strategic decisions focus on in operations management?
A: What will separate the company from the rest of the market.
Q: What do tactical decisions focus on in operations management?
A: What needs to be done and what resources are required to produce goods.
Q: What ethical responsibility does operations management have?
A: To make ethical decisions.
Q: What does scientific management assume about workers?
A: Workers are motivated only by money and are limited by their physical ability.
Q: What is the human relations movement?
A: A philosophy recognizing that factors beyond money contribute to worker productivity.
Q: What does management science focus on?
A: Developing quantitative techniques to solve operations problems.
Q: What effect did the computer age have on operations management?
A: It made data processing easier, affecting areas such as forecasting.
Q: What is just-in-time management?
A: An organizational philosophy aimed at achieving high-volume production by eliminating waste and continuous improvement.
Q: What is supply chain management?
A: The strategic coordination of the flow of goods and services to and from a company.
