Operations Management

Objectives

Operations management is the major functional field in business management, since its function is to deliver products or services to customers, assuring a match between supply and demand.
The task of operations management is to design, managing and improving the organizational processes needed to deliver products and services.
The effective management operations requires specialized analytical tools and a global perspective. This unit covers a mix of topics with an emphasis on strategic frameworks and quantitative methods. In class simple models and basic concepts will be introduced in order to analyze tradeoffs in designing and managing processes. Students will apply the ideas and analytical tools to a diversity of industries and situations.
At the end of the unit, the students shall:
a)Understand the relevance of process design and its contribution
b)Know the elements of process design
c)know how of designing and analyzing processes
d)Be able to sugest the improvements of processes

General characterization

Code

14213

Credits

2

Responsible teacher

Utku Serhatli

Hours

Weekly - Available soon

Total - Available soon

Teaching language

English

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

Recommended
Cachon, Gerard and Terwiesch, Christian, Matching Supply and Demand, 3rd edition, McGrawHill, 2013
Complementary
Ravi Anupindi et al, Managing Business Process Flows, 3rd edition, Pearson 2011
Articles to be defined
Notes developed by the instructor
Slides of the classe

Teaching method

The time for each one of the four main areas will be divided in two parts: one where the concepts will be presented and discussed and second one where examples and applications will be discussed.
The students are expected to prepare for each class by executing the tasks defined. After each main topic the student will have to apply the acquired knowledge to a specific problem.

Evaluation method

The assessment of this CU is done together with the block of CUs of the same area of knowledge. This assessment has 3 moments, which together define the final grade of the CU:
•Individual exam with a weighting of 50% of the total mark
•Group work with a weighting of 35% of the total grade value
•Individual reflection-action exercise carried out at the end of the curricular unit, with a weighting of 15%. The set of individual action-reflection exercises is a journaling activity, which will constitute a learning portfolio capable of synthesising the contributions of the Executive Master for that student.

Subject matter

1. Process Analysis
a. Measures of process performance: inventory, flow time and flow rate
b. Measuring capacity and its utilization
c. Finding the bottleneck and processes configuration
d. Buffers and balancing
2. Variability impact on process performance
a. Why averages do not work
b. Sources of variability
c. Demand and process induced variability
d. Performance measurement with variability
e. Economic implications of variability
3. Impact of Batching on process performance
a. Setups and capacity: batching
b. Batching and inventory
c. Choosing batching size
d. The case of multiproduct
4.
Revisiting process analysis with variability and batching