Submitted to: Sir Waqas Zaki

Operation Management
Assignment # 1

Areeba noor

Date: 6-nov-2013

Operation Management
Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of productionand redesigning business operations in the production of goods or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as few resources as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labor, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and/or services).

Operation Managers:
An operations manager is a senior-level employee who oversees the production of goods and/or providing of services. His or her aim is to ensure that the organization is running as smoothly and efficiently as possible, and that the goods and/or services produced meet client or customer needs. The duties of an operations manager vary from organization to organization, but generally include: monitoring existing processes and analyzing their effectiveness; creating strategies to improve productivity and efficiency; manage quality assurance programs; and supervising, hiring, and training other employees.

Operations in the services center:

Operations management often includes managing day-to-day activities as well as coming up with new processes and strategies, so potential applicants must be able to see both the big picture and the minute details. Operations in services center may include: reading, writing, and analyzing reports and statistics; presenting to stakeholders and members of upper management; establishing and tracking budgets; researching new technologies or methods of efficiency; and managing employees.

Operations in goods sector:

Operations managers who work for companies that produce goods are also required to manage inventory, facility layouts, products distribution, while those at companies which provide services focus more on human resources and customer or satisfaction.

Difference between goods and services:

Goods are considered as tangible objects. These are obviously things that you can see, touch, smell, taste, etc. In order for a good to be classified as good, it must something a person can hold, taste, consume or use. Goods are also easily transferable from one person to another. Goods also have a physical dimension and take up space someplace. Dictionary.com defines goods as, possessions, especially movable effects or personal property; articles of trade; wares; merchandise. Goods are often acquired in exchange of money or earlier it was traded for another good (i.e. wheat for rice, etc.). Services are something completely different from goods. Services are intangible commodities that cannot be touch, felt, tasted, etc. They are the opposite of goods, where goods are something that can be traded for money; services are when you hire a person or someone to do something for you in exchange of money. Services are usually hired or rented, they cannot be owned like goods can. Since it requires people and one cannot legally own a person in todays world, services can only be for hire.

The productive challenges:

Productivity is a standard efficiency metric for evaluation of production systems, broadly speaking a ratio between outputs and inputs, and can assume many specific forms, for example: machine productivity, workforce productivity, raw material productivity, warehouse productivity (=inventory turnover). It is also useful to break up productivity in use to better evaluate production systems performances. Cycle times can be modeled through manufacturing engineering if the individual operations are heavily automated, if the manual component is the prevalent one, methods used include: time and motion study, predetermined motion time systems and work sampling.

Productivity management and variable:

Regarding the planning of production there is a basic distinction between the push approach and the pull approach, with the later including the singular approach of Just in Time. Regarding the traditional pull approach a number of techniques have been developed based on the work of Ford W. Harris[5] (1913) which came to be know as the Economic Order Quantity Model (EOQ), which formed the basis of subsequent techniques as the Wagner-Within Procedure, the News Vendor Model, Base Stock Model and the Fixed Time Period Model. These models usually involve the calculation of cycle stocks and buffer stocks, the latter usually modeled as a function of demand variability. The Economic Production Quantity[15] (EPQ) differs from the EOQ model only in that it assumes a constant fill rate for the part being produced, instead of the instantaneous refilling of the EOQ model.