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.
Lean manufacturing
aims to eliminate waste at every stage of production. It involves analysing each stage of the production process, detecting where inefficiencies are and correcting them.
Materials management
is the strategy that manages the use, storage and delivery of materials to ensure the right amount of inputs is available when required in the operations system.
Inventory
is the goods and materials held as stock by an organisation.
Materials handling
is the physical handling of goods in warehouses and at distribution points.
Production plan
is an outline of the activities undertaken to combine resources (inputs) to create goods or services (outputs).
Master production scheduling
details what is to be produced and when.
Materials requirements planning
involves developing an itemised list of all materials involved in production to meet the specified orders.
Inventory control
ensures that costs are minimised and that the operations system has access to the right amounts of inputs when required.
Just in time
is a materials management strategy that ensures that the exact amount of material inputs will arrive only as they are needed in the operations process.
Supply chain
is the range of suppliers from which the organisation purchases materials and resources.
Quality
refers to the degree of excellence of goods or services and their fitness for a stated purpose.
Quality control
involves the use of inspections at various points in the production process to check for problems and defects.
Quality assurance
involves the use of a system so that an organisation achieves set standards in production.
Total quality management
is an ongoing, organisation-wide commitment to excellence that is applied to every aspect of the organisation’s operation.
Quality circles
are groups of workers who meet to solve problems relating to quality.
Continuous improvement
involves an ongoing commitment to achieving perfection.
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the systems that organisations are introducing to maintain customer contact. CRM software can be used to improve customer service and increase competitiveness, because it stores information about existing and potential customers.
Robotics
are highly specialised forms of technology capable of complex tasks.
Computer aided design
is a computerised design tool that allows a business to create product possibilities from a series of input parameters.
Computer aided manufacture
is software that designs and controls manufacturing processes.
Computer integrated manufacturing
is a method of manufacturing in which the entire production process is controlled by a computer.
Six sigma
is a quality management approach that seeks to identify and remove the causes of problems in the operations process, achieving virtually defect-free production.
Ethical management
abiding by moral standards and doing the ‘right’ thing in the interests of all stakeholders
Social responsibility
the obligations a business has over and above its legal responsibilities to the wellbeing of employees and customers, shareholders and the community as well as the environment
