MANAGING OPERATIONS AND QUALITY Managing Operations and Quality

Managing Operations and Quality

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to act as the operational Director for a profitable medium size UK company having almost 200 employees. The company is engaged in the business of producing a range of specialist garden power tools for the domestic market. These tools are being sold out through the “Do it Yourself” (DIY) stores, garden centres and the agricultural merchants under their own brand name. The DIY stores are offering the online services with home delivery to its customers; therefore, it is required to develop the operational management aspects of the introduction of on-line sales to home and overseas customers from the company's own internet website. The paper covers the different production operations, purchasing, inventory, quality and distribution through Departmental managers. Thus, the paper is the description of the activities involving operations management and their relationships to other business functions, and the relationship of operations to business performance and internal measures of success. The paper is also a description of the importance of administration for managing operations, the supply chain and quality, and the activities involved in and approach to quality management.

Operational Management Activities and its relation to other Functions of Business

Operation management is involved with the activities which are used for the designing and managing the products, supply chains, services and processes. It is mainly involved with the functioning of acquisition, utilization and development of the firm's resources needed by the firm for the purpose of delivering the goods and services as per the client's needs and wants. The main range of the purpose of operational management starts from the strategic to tactic level. The term operation management is mainly involved with the proper designing, controlling and execution of the operations which help in the conversion of the resources into desired goods and services and implementation of a strategy for company's business. However, this paper is the description of the operational management activities for DIY so that it can start its business of online sales (Ahire, 2007, p. 43).

Following are the main operational management activities which can be performed in order to start the online sales in DIY store:

Online Sales back Office Management

In order to start the online sales, the first step to be taken is the introduction of the back office. In order to conduct the online operations, there is a great need of the huge team which will be working on the back end system. This back end team will also be called as the control panel/system admin. This will be a back office whether team will be working for updating the product categories, prices, products and the specifications at DIY stores (Ritzman, 2005, p. 23). These all specifications will be listed in the website of DIY. In order to attract a huge number of customers, the marketing team will also be performing the functions of sending the mailers/newsletters by offering more incentives and ...