INSC 60023, Manufacturing & Services Operations Management

COURSE PURPOSE

This course deals with major concepts and basic techniques of enterprise operations management (OM). While OM has traditionally focused on manufacturing, we will take a broader view of enterprise operations, including aspects of product and service development, project management, and quality management.  We will look at company operations from an integrated processes perspective, stressing that all activities and functions of a firm must work together in an organized way to provide a result of value to the firm’s stakeholders.  Our view of OM spans the entire organization:  e.g., a Chief Operating Officer (COO) is in charge of R&D, design/engineering, production, marketing, sales, support, and service.  A COO is responsible for the effective, efficient, and predictable execution of integrated processes to achieve results of value.

This course aims to (1) familiarize you with the variety of problems and issues confronting operations managers and (2) provide you with the vocabulary, concepts, insights, and tools to address these issues in order to gain competitive advantage through operations.  As a first course in OM, it does not go into elaborate or sophisticated models or techniques.  Rather, it provides an overview of several areas, brief exposure to some models, and experience with some basic tools.  A working knowledge of operations—which typically employs the greatest percentage of employees and the largest investment in assets in a firm—is indispensable for general managers and entrepreneurs.  Hence, this course is part of the MBA Core Curriculum.

We will look at relationships between operations and strategy:  different business strategies require different process capabilities, and different operational capabilities allow and support different strategies to gain competitive advantage.  A process view of operations will be used to analyze different key dimensions such as capacity management, flow time management, and quality management.  We will also overview recent developments such as Lean, Just-In-Time, Six Sigma, and business process reengineering.  Throughout, we will stress the managerial insights and the underlying assumptions.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

·         Understand the role of operations management in the firm

·         Understand the fundamentals of a process-based company

·         Understand process flows in two contexts:  repetitive operations and unique projects

·         Analyze throughput, flow time, cost, and capability for repetitive processes

·         Apply statistical process control techniques to repetitive processes

·         Analyze slack, critical path, and crashing opportunities for project processes

·         Understand process improvement principles and tools

·         Determine appropriate inventory levels, reorder points, and reorder quantities

·         Apply statistical techniques to account for uncertainty and risk

·         Understand the role of quantitative modeling for managerial decision support

[back to previous page]