Industrial management Gurghian Alexandru

Managing for results

 Operations are a critical succes factor for most organizations and can be a key element in their competitive advantage. Viewing the operational system as a transformation function that adds value to inputs to create output helps to identify non value adding activities as well as way to produce faster, better and/or cheaper results.

 A three-pronged view of strategy integrates the domains of operation management sale marketing and finance accounting to create a value proposition that is distinctive understood and feasible. The resource-based view of the firm in general and VRIO analysis in particular can facilitate decision to enhance or develop resources for further competitive advantage.

A practical approach to operations

 Applying system thinking can broaden a managers perspective beyond a particular subsystem and provide new insights to improve each efectivness. As results an organization can avoid suboptimization and encourage data based decision making and improve operational robustness. Like any system a business operation is a dynamic purposeful for action of components and material and information flow among these components.

 Organizational system tend to be complex with multiple systems numerous feedback loops and permeable boundaries with the environment. Understanding key factors in a operations environment puts the manager in a better position to anticipate changes and avoid suboptimal decision.

Organizational performance

 New product and service development is integral to an organization performance. It is a funnel like process that typically progresses from idea generation to feasibility analysis and case development. Source of ideas can be customer driven or technology driven. Typical tradeoffs in design factors include choice between product service features, flexibility and efficiency, inventory levels and responsiveness, hiring and using overtime and risk and reward. A key consideration in organizational performance is the total cost of ownership which represents a trade-off between short and long term costs.

 Product per service delivery processes typically range from a project form to a job shop batch process assembly line or continuous flow depending on the volume level of technological investment and life cycle stage of the product. Service offerings can be categorized by both the labor intensity and the extent of the interaction and customization with customers.

Quality across the organization

 Quality is defined as the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs. The basic principle for managing quality across an organization are to focus on the customer, promote team-work and empowerment within the organization emphasis continuous improvement identify value added and waste, and reduce variability.

 Six Sigma lean production and total quality management are all management systems used to improve quality across the organization. They follow the same basic principle and employ many of the same technique in implementation. The ISO 9000 standard also pertain to management across the organization but they are more of an evaluation and certification tool than an implementation approach.

Process effectiveness

 Effective process are designed with the desired results in mind and the design addresses process form and capacity requirement resource need its the extent of customer involvement, variability source, and interdependences. When assessing existing process a criteria based evaluation should consider simplification opportunities for waste elimination, visual control and excess inventory.

 Process can be difficult to change because the people involved may be unable to reconceptualize the process, be invested in individual job design or limited possibilities by protecting their position. Fear is an important factor to consider, be clear about the expected benefits of changing the process.