OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations Management and Company Goals

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Critical Analysis2

Management information systems as a vehicle for operations management2

Benefits of employing management information system3

The financial service industry and operations management4

Operations management for success at McDonalds6

Operations management by Chevrolet UK Limited7

Conclusion9

References10

Operations Management and Company Goals

Introduction

Operations management relates to the design and management of services, supple chains and products, and their supply (Shim 1995, p. 289). The focus of operations management is to make efficient delivery of good and services to clients possible through development, acquisition and utilizations of various resources. Operations management takes place at all levels in the organization. For instance, it can take place at the tactical, operations and even strategic level. Many companies around the globe are focussing on employing operations management as a tool to provide their valued customers with better products and services, so that can get their customer lifetime value.

There are several issues related to the field of operations management. These are an attempt to improve plant management and its layout, better control of production scheduling, rapid inventory management, expedition of production processes and better equipment maintenance. On a broad scale, we can say that the goal of operations management is to achieve effectiveness and efficiency of different operations of the organization (Shim 1999, p. 305). Various organisations deploy operations management for various purposes. For instance, the application of operations management in the fast moving consumer goods industry will be very different from the application of operations management in the car manufacturing industry. Similarly, it will be different for a restaurant and different for a car wash station. Hence, there are five purposes of operations management. These are flexibility, speed, quality, cost management and dependability.

Critical Analysis

Management information systems as a vehicle for operations management

It is often argued, that an organisation's management information system may be the vehicle that will enable the successful implementation of operations management concepts. A large manufacturing company needs to employ MIS to the one of its ongoing projects. The project presented here involves the integration of production and the maintenance functions which are necessary to support the production unit. This will be a new concept to the UK based organization as previously the people in the organization responsible for the two functions were working indifferently from each other. The management realized that the the two groups need to cooperate. Moreover, this cooperation is essential as functions of the two departments are interrelated. In spite of this fact, the two were working for different goals. The implementation of management information system for integration between the production and maintenance units is a pilot project. It will be implemented only in one of the five production units of the manufacturing company (Fuller 2000, p. 59).

The problem with the manufacturing unit of the company is the fact that important concepts such as a machine availability and machine downtime, which represents the number of hours in a day that the machine was available and used for production, were not understood by those ...