Introduction to Operations Management - I

Prof. B Mahadevan
Summary – Understanding Operations

So, we have come to the end of the first module on understanding operations. So, operations is a very basic
requirement in all organisations it could be government, it could be not for profit, manufacturing, service,
multi-nationals, trust. Doesn't really matter and there are several decisions regarding capacity, design, supply
chain, resource deployment and so many other operational choices, which are all part of this decision making
and all these in a collective sense create the competitive advantage for firms from operations.

So, what's the first step in this? First step in this process is actually understanding operations particularly the
configurations and some broad patterns in organisations. If we may recollect, three types of patterns which we
saw, the continuous and the streamline flow was one, the intermittent flow was the second and the jumbled
flow systems was the third one. And this led us to an understanding that volume and the variety of offerings
which organisations make, indeed, determines the flow patterns in organisations and we also found that
ultimately they influence the complexity of managing operations. So I think this is a very important issue that
we need to remember.

The other issue is we need performance measures because we need to prioritize efforts and choices that we
need to make in operations. Also, we need to assess the impact of various operational choices that we make.
So, obviously we need some good performance metrics. We did talk about it.

With this understanding of operations, we may be in a position to develop an overall sense of how things work
from a perspective of operations and perhaps to focus on specific aspects of operations in some detail, which
we will see in the rest of the modules.

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