Managment Critical

The operations management of any organization involves the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the primary products and services of the organization. From an organizational point of view, operations management may be defined as the management of the direct resources that are required to produce and deliver organizational goods and services. Operations management is an area of business that is concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient and effective. It is also the management of resources and the distribution of goods and services to customers. However, people tend to misunderstand operations management with the subject of operations research.

A few examples of applications in which operations research is currently used include designing layout of a factory for efficient flow of materials, constructing a telecommunications network at low cost while still guaranteeing quality service if particular connections become very busy or get damaged, road traffic management and 'one way' street allocations, determining the routes of school buses so that as few buses are needed as possible, designing the layout of a computer chip to reduce manufacturing time (therefore reducing cost), managing the flow of raw materials and products in a supply chain based on uncertain demand for the finished products, efficient messaging and customer response tactics, roboticizing or automating human-driven operations processes, globalizing operations processes in order to take advantage of cheaper materials, labor, or other productivity inputs, managing freight transportation and delivery systems, network data traffic: these are known as queuing models or queuing systems, sports events and their television coverage, blending of raw materials in oil refineries, etc, etc.

The important issue is that there must be a connection between what the market wants and what the operation can do well operations resource capabilities. The operations resource perspective works the other way round from the market requirements perspective.