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Explain how operational excellence can lead to competitive advantage. Organizations can reach premier competitive advantage in lowering costs and boosting performance by effectively and efficiently operating the management of production systems, product quality, inventory systems, supply chains, and product and process development. |
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Describe different operating strategies managers can pursue. The four main categories of production systems that represent the flow of work are: job shop (individual ordered items), small batch (small batches of different items), assembly-line production (mass production of standardized items), and continuous flow production (continuous production of standardized items). |
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Explain the role of operations in an enterprise. Managing operations is the central task of organizations and is the effort of increasing productivity while lowering costs in an effective and efficient manner by configuring the firm’s production system, adopting flexible production technologies, pioneering process innovations, optimizing capacity investments and production scheduling, and reducing turnaround time. |
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Outline how the design of production systems and strategies for asset utilization, improving product quality, managing inventory, managing supply chains, and developing products can all improve the efficiency of an organization. Optimal streamline work flow configurations improve productivity and costs and can be analyzed if outlined in a model cell. Optimization can be achieve by several strategies: physically placing adjacent processes near one another, standardizing procedures, eliminating loop backs, eliminating bottlenecks, and separating routine tasks from specialized tasks. All of these strategies reveal efficiencies or inefficiencies of asset utilization, product quality, inventory management, supply chain management, and developing products. |
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Describe methodologies for improving operating processes, and explain how improvements in processes over time can lead to competitive advantage. Reducing costs while increasing productivity is the “heart” or goal of operations. Traditional strategies of mass production of standardized products has yielded the cost advantages of economies of scale and learning effects because of specialization. However, customization of products is important for some industries in order to gain distinction against rivals. The invention of flexible production technologies gives firms the ability to mass produce customized outputs while lowering costs, thus offering hope for competitive advantage. The result is an increase in customer loyalty and repeat purchases. |