Introduction to operations management Flashcards
What is operations management?
Operations management is the activity of managing the resources that create and deliver services and products. The operations function is the part of the organisation that is responsible for this activity. Every organisation has an operations function because every organisation creates some type of services and/or products.
What is the purpose of operations management?
- Create and deliver service and product.
- In every organisation whether Service or Manufacturing (goods), profit or not for profit.
What are examples of goods?
- Tangible product.
- Product can be inventoried.
- Low customer contact.
- Longer response time.
- Capital intensive.
What are examples of services?
- Intangible product.
- Product cannot be inventoried.
- High customer contact.
- Short response time.
- Labour intensive.
What are key activities of an operations manager?
- Forecasting
- Facility location
- Quality management
- Process design
- Inventory management
- Design
- Planning and budgeting
What are the key approaches of operations management?
Specialisation of tasks - Adam Smith
Standardisation of part - Eli Whitney
Scientific management - Frederick Taylor
Time and motion studies - Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
Mass production - Henry Ford
Quality control - W Edwards Deming
What is specialisation of tasks?
- Adam Smith (Scottish economist) who drew attention towards scientific operations management in 1776.
- Advocated the importance of the division of labour in his book ‘The Wealth of Nations’.
- Higher skill accompanied by the workmen who are performing work in repetition.
- Specialisation of tasks often results in improvement in the various steps involved in production.
- Time is saved while changing from one activity to another.
What is standardisation of parts?
- Eli Whitney was known for inventing the cotton gin (a machine used to separate cotton fibres).
- In 1798, received a government contract to make 10,000 muskets.
- Previously such items had to be produced by hand.
- Showed that machine tools could make standardised parts to exact specifications.
- Musket parts could be used in any musket.
What is scientific management?
- “Father of scientific management”.
- Maximum prosperity arises from maximum efficiency.
- Division of labour – functional specialism.
- Separation of “doing” and “thinking”.
- Workers should have exact instructions.
- Working methods should be standardised; the single best way of doing things.
- Focus on training to increase efficiency.
- Specialisation led to functional layouts and eventually production lines.
What are time and motion studies?
- Developed work measurement methods through time and motion studies.
- Motion and time analysis could be used to help find a preferential way of doing the work and could assist in effectively managing or controlling the activity.
- These studies are done to create a baseline that can be used in the future when evaluating changes.
- The goal can be to understand the skills required to enable individuals to perform the work.
What is mass production?
- A manufacturing technique that involves producing large quantities of the same product over a sustained period of time.
- Founder of the Ford Motor company.
- “Father” of assembly lines.
- ‘Fordism’ – mass production of inexpensive cars.
- 1913 first moving automobile assembly line at Highland Park.
- Ford broke the Model T’s assembly into 84 discrete steps and trained each of his workers to do just one.
- Reduced the time it took to build a car from more than - 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes.
- Ford’s Model T, was simple, sturdy and relatively inexpensive.
What’s quality control?
- A company’s methods for assessing product quality and, if necessary, improving it.
- Widely acknowledged as the leading management thinker in the field of quality.
- Credited with teaching japan quality control methods in post world war 2.
- Used statistics to analyse processes.
- His philosophy is one of cooperation and continual improvement.
- His methods involve workers in decisions.
- Deming taught a statistics training program and used the Shewhart Cycle for Learning and Improvement (the PDCA W Cycle).
What is the decision making process in operations management?
- Focus on cost and efficiency.
- Focus on quality.
- Focus on customisation and design.
- Focus on time.
- Focus on service and value.
- Focus on sustainability.
- Focus on data and analytics.
What are the inputs, transformation process and outputs of the process?
Inputs:
- Materials
- Information
- Customers
Transforming resources:
- Facilities
- Staff
Outputs:
- Customers
What are the four V’s
- The volume of their output;
- The variety of their output.
- The variation in the demand for their output;
- The degree of visibility which customers have of the creation of their output.
