Basic Operations Management decisions in any industry

Any organisation or industry has to essentially go through these 10 areas of decision making.

1. Design of Goods and Services. - looking at the product or service, deciding the best mix of materials and machines to produce it in the most economical and less wasteful way

2. Quality Management - ensuring the production of goods or service out of the facility meets the highest standards of quality in the production stage

3. Process and Capacity Design - deciding on how the various proceses are arranged and the capacity of each of it to help achieve the final output

4. Location Strategy - where to locate the unit in order to leverage on the lowest costs of transportation and availability of skilled labour

5. Layout Design and Strategy. - one location is decided how should the facility be designed to keep productivity high and wastes low

6. Human Resources and Job Design - recruiting and motivating the right labour to help achieve targets at the best cost

7. Supply Chain Management - determining the source of the suppliers and the destination demand, the markets and planning out on the best transportation and logistics strategies to meet the capacity and demand

8. Inventory Management - the best production batch size and storage policies that effect overall minimum costs of storage and ordering

9. Scheduling - in a production facility finding the best sequence of carrying out the service or jobs on machines in the most optimised and effective manner

10. Maintenance - ensuring proper and timely upkeep of machines and processes that ensures high uptime of the facility

All these processes can help get the output out from the facility. But the organisation will have its priorities and would have identified its core competence areas, how to maintain its competitive edge over the competitors. 

Twenty five years ago, John Elkington coined the term, the 3Ps, the triple bottom line.  Just at the start of the Industrial revolution we find the first phase building up.

• Industry 1.0, the only focus has been on profit.  
• Industry 2.0 has seen the focus also shifting to profit and people, which includes the better utilisation of human resources, ie. the employees, customers, suppliers, other stake holders etc. 
• Industry 3.0  focuses on profit, people and planet, we see great attention on sustainability standards, limiting the climate  change, limiting Carbon footprints and on Carbon credits.
• Industry 4.0 focuses on profit, people, planet and performance.  All the focus we see on setting voluntary emission cuts attaining sustainability targets, focusing on automation, AI, IoT, smart factories etc improving the performance of the system, delivering higher value to customers and stakeholders, raising productivity and lowering costs.
  

Operations strategy looks at the different ways to improve and retain the competitive advantage. 

George