OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT – INFORMATION
Operations management is one of the central functions of all organisations whether producing goods or services. Managers at all levels are expected to have a thorough understanding of operations so that they can ensure their organisations run efficiently and effectively.
Interim assessment – collaborative assessment Purpose Operations management was traditionally considered to be a function which deals with day to day delivery of product and services. However, increasingly organisations have recognised the importance of the strategic role of operation function in achieving competitive success in the market. The purpose of this activity is to evaluate how the operation function can have a strategic impact on a business, and propose recommendations to its process and supply network design.
Assessment brief – This assessment is divided into two phases – both must be completed by you. As outlined below, in phase 1 you post an individual contribution on the forum and then in phase 2 you write a report.
Phase 1 (5 % weighting) Assessment brief – In this phase, you are required to find an organisation that leads the market in terms of the way they manage their operations and carry out the following activities. The organisation can be your company or any organisation with which you are familiar.
Forum contribution – Phase 1
- Identify the top priority operations performance objective for the organisation and, post an individual contribution on the forum with a brief description of the selected operations performance objective. Please ensure that you make a convincing argument on why the selected performance objective is important for the business and how it has contributed to winning the market. (150 words).
- When you have posted your individual contribution, find a contribution that has been posted by another student. Reply to their post with a comment that compares their organisation with the one you have found in terms of their key operations performance objectives and the associated trade-offs (100 words).
Note: you will not be able to see any other posts or comments until you post your own contribution first. Your individual post and the comment (total 250 words) will be marked on the scale of 1 to 5: Try-harder, Acceptable, Good, Very good, and Excellent, which represent 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% of the total marks allocated for Phase 1, respectively.
Phase 2 (25 % weighting) Assessment brief
Reflecting on what you have learned from the Phase 1 task and drawing on the insights from the article provided below (Iansiti and Lakhani 2017), write a report that critically evaluates the process design or the supply network design of an organisation with which you are familiar, and propose recommendations for further improvement.
You need to choose between one of the following levels for your analysis:
- Operations level
- Supply network level
In the report, you are required to:
- Describe the organisation so that the reader can clearly understand what the organisation does and the organisational context (about 150 words)
- Describe the process flow (or the supply network flow) of the organisation and define the key performance objectives and their relative importance for the business. If it is a large organisation, you may focus on only a part of the operation/network or one product line (about 250 words)
- Use some of the concepts from process design (or supply network design) topic to critically analyse the current operations design and propose recommendations, which would contribute to improving one or more operations performance objectives that you identify as most important for the business. (about 700 words)
- Discuss briefly, how emerging digital technologies, such as the examples provided in the article, could assist in further improving the operations performance of the business. (about 250 words)
- A conclusion which summarises the report (about 150 words)
You are strongly encouraged to:
- Use the Phase 1 comments from other contributors to broaden and strengthen your understanding of the concepts.
- Draw on the relevant insights from the following article:
This article discusses how digitisation is dramatically changing the nature of operations and process management decisions and their implications for the operations managers in the 21st-century.
Iansiti, M & Lakhani, K. 2017, What the companies on the right side of the Digital Business Divide have in common, viewed July 26, 2018,
Requirements
The required word length for this assessment (phase 2) is 1500 words (plus or minus 10%).
APA 6 – author-date style referencing (which includes in-text citations plus a reference list).
Reference lists for assessments normally contain the following number of relevant references from different sources:
8–12 (for MBA assessments). Ideally, the references shouldn’t be more than 5-years old. – Must be listed alphabetically!!
- All references must be from credible sources such as books, industry related journals, magazines, company documents and recent academic articles.
- Your grade will be adversely affected if your assessment contains no/poor citations and/or reference list and if your assessment word length is beyond the allowed tolerance level
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ckn9KjkgK0
Hammer, M 2004, ‘Deep change: how operational innovation can transform your company’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 82, no. 4, pp. 84–93.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8XIiCH3L_I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFu4FFgbMY4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UxRAhTJ1CM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS5rHgGheHk
Supply network design – (THIS IS FOR READING PURPOSES TO ASSIST AND TO OBTAIN A GRASP FOR MY ASSESSMENT)
TOPIC 2
Information to read on to critically analyse for assessment purpose…
The design of the supply network is simply the arrangement of the elements or members of the network that serve the needs of the organisation. The network is comprised of all the members both suppliers and customers that have a role in the operations and processes of a particular organisation.
The primary task of the operations manager is to ensure that the network serves the needs
of the organisation for input goods and services, and for efficient and effective flow of goods
and services to client organisations and individual customers. Because the operations
manager does not control the network most of it belongs to different owners with different business goals –he or she cannot really “design” it to their own liking. What they can do is to negotiate arrangements with the members of the network in order to obtain the best possible outcome for the company. To do this, the textbook suggests that managers must understand the individual components in the network, their characteristics and the
relationships between them.
