Unit 3 Flashcards
Operations management
operations management: all the activities in which managers engage to produce goods or services
Tangibles
are goods, which can be touched.
Intangibles
include services, which cannot be touched.
Operations manager
Operations managers are responsible for allocating departments’ resources for the whole company to be profitable and to function efficiently.
Inputs (includes examples)
are resources used in the process of production.
Eg. Materials includes raw materials, components and parts consumed or converted by the transformation process.
Capital equipment includes the plant, machinery, equipment and property necessary to conduct operations.
Labour refers to people involved in the operations function.
Information from a variety of sources contributes to the transformation process. Organisations do not always account for the value of this resource, because it cannot be easily quantified as a business asset.
Time and its efficient use are critical to all organisations. Coordinating resources within appropriate time frames limits costs and wastage. Operational planning may involve achieving production tasks ranging in duration from one year to merely hours.
Money is generally considered to be the most flexible of all resources, because it can easily be converted into any quantity or combination of materials, capital or labour.
Transformation (include examples)
is the conversion of inputs (resources) into outputs (goods or services).
Your school takes its main inputs — students, the syllabus, staff and buildings — and produces educated, employable graduates.
Outputs (include examples)
refer to the end result of an organisation’s efforts — the service or product that is delivered or provided to the consumer.
A car is an output that requires many individual processes. There may be several thousand inputs, such as nuts and bolts, supplied by hundreds of businesses.
Productivity
productivity: a measure of efficiency — the amount of output produced compared to the amount of input required in production
Business competitiveness
refers to the ability of an organisation to sell products in a market.
Facilities design and layout
involves planning the layout of workspace to streamline the production process.
Fixed position layout
deals with large-scale processes, such as the construction of bridges, ships, aircraft or buildings.
Product layout
deals with the manufacturing of goods in mass volume using an assembly line.
Process layout
deals with high varieties of products by grouping activities, equipment and machinery of similar function together.
Retail layout
Exposure is a critical consideration to the layout of retail stores. Retailers such as Coles and Woolworths use approaches such as:
locating high-impulse or high-margin products in prominent locations — often at the end of aisles or near checkouts
locating ‘high-draw’ items such as bread and dairy products on opposite sides of the store
locating ‘power items’ (high-priority items for most shopping trips) at intervals throughout a series of aisles.
Office layout
Efficient movement of information and proximity to resources (such as the photocopier, computers, printers and storage areas) are priorities for the layout of an office. Locating workstations together in departments that are required to communicate constantly may also be important. In a manufacturing organisation, the office layout is often informal and may overlook the factory floor, so managers can easily supervise. For a service provider, such as an accountant or a doctor, clients need to feel welcome, but privacy is a concern, so the layout of the office should reflect this.
