Business Operations
Business operations refer to the activities and processes involved in running a company to ensure its day-to-day functioning. This includes production, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and other essential functions that contribute to the overall success of the business. Effective business operations management is crucial for optimizing efficiency, reducing costs, and delivering value to customers.
7 Key excerpts on "Business Operations"
eBook - ePubSolutions
Business Problem Solving
- Frank Fletcher, Eric Bolland, Eric Bolland(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 12 Operations Management RIK BERRY The day-to-day activities of business, even in the smallest of firms, are complex, with multiple activities occurring concurrently, sequentially or both. The interaction of activities is often critical to successfully executing the overall business strategy. Each functional area plays a part. Marketing identifies and targets sales opportunities while sales closes the deal. Production creates the goods or service. Human resources finds and develops personnel. Finance provides the funds and accounting keeps track of financial activities. None of these functional areas operates independently. The customer purchases the goods or service to satisfy needs. Operations provides the goods or services to satisfy those needs. The vast majority of organizations in the US are classified as service organizations. Therefore, while operations may move physical goods, often these goods are a small part of the overall package. This applies to all sizes of organizations and at all stages of the product/service and firm life cycles. Planning and executing are critical to success. While it may be that management wants to control all aspects of the business, it is usually one or maybe a few critical operations that really matter. These primary processes need significant management attention for successful execution of the firm as a whole. These are the points that require performance measures and are leveraging points in the management information system used to manage operations. Operations management is at the core of business and suggestions for focused operations management are the main topics of this chapter. How does operations management fit into the business? If marketing and sales are the external focus of a company, operations are where the internal emphasis lies. Astute managers know that no part of a company stands on its own...
eBook - ePub- Frank Rowbotham, Masoud Azhashemi, Les Galloway(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These are the resultant outcomes of the contribution made by the input resources and the relevant conversion processes. The transformation model can be used as a framework to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of an operation. Service concept This defines what a service organization is providing or selling and what the customer is buying or using. The key elements of the service concept are: the organizing idea the service experience the service outcome the service operation/process the service value. Strategic importance of operations Decisions made in operations management must be in harmony with the organization’s corporate and business strategic objectives. This will help the total business to maintain its competitive position in the market place. Depending on the type and size of organizations there are three forms or levels of strategies: 1 Corporate strategy. How should the organization as a whole fulfil its long-term objectives? 2 Business strategy. How should the individual functions in the business such as marketing, finance, operations, and so on, compete in the market place? 3 Functional strategy. How should the individual business functions manage their resources in order to contribute to the fulfilment of a firm’s corporate and business objectives? The content and process of operations strategy An operations strategy consists of two parts. The first component is the ‘content’ of the operations strategy, which is an outline of the operation’s policies and principles. The second component is the ‘process’ of the operations strategy, which shows the way in which these policies and plans are decided. Performance characteristics of operations Operations can have five performance objectives. They usually prioritize these objectives according to the needs of their immediate markets, the actions of their competitors, and the stage of their organization’s products and services in their life cycles...
eBook - ePubThe 30 Day MBA
Your Fast Track Guide to Business Success
- Colin Barrow(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Kogan Page(Publisher)
...10 Operations management Outsourcing Production methods Controlling operations Maintaining quality Information systems MIT Sloane defines operations management as the subject that ‘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’. This, the school goes on to explain, ranges from strategic issues such as where plants are located down to tactical levels such as plant layout, production scheduling, inventory management, quality control and inspection, traffic and materials handling, and equipment maintenance policies. To stay ahead, companies need to generate innovation, organize production, collaborate with other companies and manage the performance of activities, processes, resources and control systems used to deliver goods and services. Operations management is the catch-all title used to hold all these disparate fields together. Often in business schools the subject is afforded a distinct syllabus of its own, as for example is the case at Cranfield School of Management, Warwick and Bocconi, in Milan, Italy. At Cardiff Business School, Logistics and Operations Management are bundled together with a strong emphasis on ‘Lean Thinking’ and in Barcelona’s Esade Business School ‘Innovation’ is the partner subject. However the subject is taught, the foundations if not the content started out with the work of Frederick W Taylor. Usually referred to as the ‘father of scientific management’, he studied and measured the way people worked, searching out ways to improve productivity. His book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911, Harper and Row, New York), showed how science could replace apprenticeship as the way to transfer knowledge about how tasks should be done...
- Jeff Slawsky, Samee Zafar(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Business strategy may be clever thinking but it has no significance unless the company has charted for itself a clear and viable operational strategy to put it into effect. In the minds of managers, operational strategy quite often plays second fiddle to business strategy – its sexier sister. But the truth is that the two are inseparable. Operational strategy provides the necessary answers to the equally important and fundamental questions about business viability that most strategy consultants overlook: • What processes and resources are required to develop and deliver products and services? • What are the options for delivering the products and services? • How will the business retain its customers? • How can processes be made inexpensive and efficient? Operations management objectives The successful management of payment card operations requires the pursuit of the following key managerial objectives: • delivering business strategy • cost optimization • operational efficiency enhancement. A good operations department will focus on continual savings in costs and enhancements in efficiency. The cost and efficiency of product delivery has a direct and significant impact on card program profitability and customer retention. This is especially true in mature and saturated marketplaces where it is very difficult to increase market share without lowering prices and nearly impossible to raise prices without losing market share. Genuine innovation can break this deadlock. But in the financial services industry, radical innovation is rare. The pressure to increase profitability falls on the cost side of the profitability equation. If revenues cannot be raised, costs must be pared down. It is important to note that cost optimization does not necessarily mean cost reduction. Cost optimization, it is often said, is about cutting fat. Cost reduction, on the other hand, often results in cutting muscle, impairing the competitive strength of the business...
eBook - ePubThe Operations Advantage
A Practical Guide to Making Operations Work
- Nigel Slack(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Kogan Page(Publisher)
...03 Make operations a strategic asset It is an exasperating coincidence that the words ‘operat ions management’ and ‘operat ional management’ are so similar. They are not the same; they are very different. ‘Operational’ is the opposite of strategic. We all understand, more or less, what strategy means. It means long term, it means guiding the enterprise in its business environment, it means working with abstract, even philosophical, ideas; and it means that something is really important. When you hear the word ‘operational’ on the other hand, you take it to mean detailed, localized and, if only by implication, not as important as strategic. In fact, ‘operational’ is hugely important, but we’ll come to that later. ‘Operations’ (as opposed to ‘operational’), as we explored in Chapter 1, is how you manage your resources and processes. You can look at ‘operations’ from either a strategic or an operational perspective. In this chapter we look at how your operations should have an important strategic role, in fact it should be central to the strategy of your whole business. Achieving long-term competitive success through the driving force of a great operations function is never easy and takes time, but, as we said in the previous chapter, it must start with expectations. If we expect only mediocrity from our operations function, that’s exactly what we get. Yet, if we expect operations to inspire the whole firm – well at least that creates the possibility of achieving it...
eBook - ePub- Andrew Josey(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Van Haren Publishing(Publisher)
...For all their logic, computers are still surprisingly unreliable. Servers running well-tested software may remain “up” for weeks, and then all of a sudden hang and have to be rebooted. Sometimes it is clear why (for example, a log file filled up that no-one expected) and in other cases, there just is no explanation. 8.3. Defining Operations Management (Syllabus Reference: Unit 6, Learning Outcome LO-ops-v-dev: You should be able to explain the differences between operations and development work) Traditional operations management concentrates on the question of work and who is doing what. “… operations is the work done to keep a system running in a way that meets or exceeds operating parameters specified by a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). Operations includes all aspects of a service’s lifecycle: from initial launch to the final decommissioning and everything in between.” [ 23 ] — Limoncelli et al. For the Digital Practitioner, “operations” tends to have a more technical meaning than the classic business definition, being focused on the immediate questions of systems integrity, availability and performance, and feedback from the user community (i.e., the service or help desk). In a digitally transformed enterprise, operations is part of the product. Development and operations may even be completely merged. The primary thing that operations does not do is develop new systems functionality. Operations is process-driven and systematic and tends to be interrupt-driven. Operations is the direct facilitation and support of the digital value experience. It tends to be less variable, more repeatable, yet more interrupt-driven than product development work...
- Pierre-Andre Julien, Pierre-Andre Julien(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Operations management “…to whom some could reproach that, since they do not see either end of the joining line between too much and too little, long and short, light and heavy, near and far, and since they recognize neither its end nor its beginning, they judge very uncertainly about the middle.” Michel de Montaigne, “Essai”. 1. Introduction 1.1 Definition of operations management (OM) Noilet, Kelada and Diorio (1986) gave the following definition of operations management: “A set of planning, organization, command and control activities, to which are sometimes added assurance activities, applicable to production operations. The management activities are aimed at helping achieve the firm’s strategic goals or objectives, through optimal use of the tangible and intangible resources at its disposal. In doing so, the activity managers consider the various internal and external constraints to be respected” (our translation). These same authors, at the beginning of their book, state that they have used the terms “production”, “operations” and “production operations” synonymously. Rather than embarking on a discussion of the terminology, the author of this chapter has preferred to suggest that many of the activities and functions of a manufacturing production firm are closely linked, and that most cannot be isolated, in whole or in part, without some difficulty...
