Operations Management Exam Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Operations Management Exam - Essay Example A great deal of focus is on efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Therefore, operations management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes. Ultimately, the nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of products or services in the organization, for example, retail, manufacturing, wholesale, etc.It is about the transformation of production and operational inputs into "outputs" that, when distributed, meet the needs of customers. Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want. Operation Management ranges from strategic to tactical and operational levels. Representative strategic issues include determining the size and location of manufacturing plants, deciding the structure of service or telecommunications networks, and designing technology supply chains. Tactical issues include plant layout and structure, project management methods, and equipment selection and replacement. Operational issues include production scheduling and control, inventory management, quality control and inspection, traffic and materials handling, and equipment maintenance policies. In a production unit (e.g. ... Capacity management is responsible for ensuring that infrastructure resources are well geared up to satisfy planned business needs effectively. The desired goal for capacity management is to provide a service that is proactive rather than reactive in nature. Measuring capacity Capacity, being the ability to produce work in a given time, must be measured in the unit of work. For example, consider a domestic air conditioning units factory that has a capacity of 10,000 " machine hours" in each 40 hour week. This factory should be capable of producing 10,000 "standard hours of work" during a 40-hour week. The actual volume of product that the factory can produce will depend on: -The amount of work involved in production (e.g. does a product require 1, 5, 10 standard hours -Any additional time required in production (e.g. machine set-up, maintenance) -The productivity or effectiveness of the factory. The major work components of capacity management are: Performance management is a continuous improvement process that examines application and system performance and analyze them for possible improvements, analyzes the costs and requirements, commissions the corrective work, then measures and reports the results. An effective performance management team can reclaim infrastructure capacity by finding ways to improve the way applications consume resources. Workload management uses data from performance monitoring tools to separate resource usage by business process rather than individual increments of usage on a particular infrastructure component. The goal is to address capacity needs on a business process basis. Since some business processes have downstream effects on other