Operations Management

• Author: Janel Kupferschmid
• Pages: 560-563

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An important element of any business system is management, whether an individual or a team performs it. In

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American society, we no longer think of company management in terms of one person acting as the entrepreneur, but rather as a team effort. Each member possesses specialized knowledge and understanding of one functional area of the business system and is by temperament and training able to work cooperatively with other members of the team toward a common goal.

Whatever the system or organization, the functions of management are always the same: (1) designing, (2) planning, (3) organizing, (4) directing, and (5) controlling. Management establishes the goals and objectives of the firm or organization and plans how to attain them. It is management that organizes the system and directs it so that its goals can be reached. Finally, management must be able to analyze the working of the system in order to control it and to correct any variations from the planned procedures in order to reach the predetermined goals. These functions interact with one another and managers must be skilled in these coordinating processes and functions if they are to accomplish their goals through the efforts of other people.

The concepts of managerial functions has some hidden difficulties when one attempts to apply them to a specific managerial job. First, one cannot tell which functions are most important and how much time must be allocated to each. All functions are important parts of a manager's job, but the significance attached to each one may vary at different times, such as at different stages of a product life cycle. Furthermore, the significance of each function varies at different management levels in the same organization. Operations management, for example, is more focused on directing and controlling than on planning or organizing.

All organizations have operations. Operation management, or technical management, is comprised of department managers and persons with professional technical competence. This level is oriented downward to basic operations, such as producing goods and moving them out the door. A manufacturing company may conduct operation in a mill or factory. The driving force in operations management must be an overriding goal of continually improving service to customers, where customer means the next process as well as the final external user. Since there is an operations element in every function of the enterprise, all people in all jobs in every department of the organization should work together for the improvement of their own operations management elements. It is important to note that the technical expert often seeks recognition from peers and colleagues rather than from managers at the administrative level.

INPUT

The input of a system depends on its specific objective. What raw materials will yield the desired output? If one were to visually illustrate a system, the input would be shown as the...