Operations Management
Module leaders: Professor Linda Hendry and Dr Brian McGarrie
Duration and timing: 24 hours, Autumn Term
Overview
Good management of operations is critical both to ensure that day-to-day operations run smoothly and to deliver value to customers and the business as a whole within its overall strategy. To deliver value, operations must identify and work to appropriate success criteria, drive continuous improvement and be capable of delivering the changes required to develop performance for the future.
Using a series of cases to explore various aspects of operations management within companies, this module aims to develop your understanding of operations and supply chain management. The focus will be on the operations management challenge of ensuring that customers’ current requirements and expectations are met or exceeded and that the operations function works in an integrated way with other functions.
The module is designed to give you the ability to:
- understand the functions and processes involved in managing operations
- apply operations management frameworks for designing, diagnosing and improving operations
- understand the role of operations management in both the day-to-day activity of an organisation and the long-term strategy
- adopt a theoretically-informed approach to analysing operations, in case studies and in ‘real-life’ operations
- identify key operational performance criteria for each area of operational activities, pinpoint the critical issues for operations and design actions for performance improvement
- appreciate the relationship between operations and other functional areas such as marketing and management accounting, and the inter-relationship between the 'hard' and 'soft' aspects of operations management
- understand the contribution that operations makes to the development and implementation of successful strategy
Assessment
Entirely by coursework
