WHAt is OM?

Operations management (OM) is the business function that plans, organizes, coordinates, and controls the resources needed to produce a companys goods and services. Operations management is a management function. It involves managing people, equipment, technology, information, and many other resources. Operations management is the central core function of every company. This is true whether the company is large or small, provides a physical good or a service, is for prot or not for prot. Every company has an operations management function. Actually, all the other organizational functions are there primarily to support the operations function. Without operations, there would be no goods or services to sell. Consider a retailer such as Gap that sells casual apparel. The marketing function provides promotions for the merchandise, and the nance function provides the needed capital. It is the operations function, however, that plans and coordinates all the resources needed to design, produce, and deliver the merchandise to the various retail locations. Without operations, there would be no goods or services to sell to customers. http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/48/04713472/0471347248-3.pdf

Planning and Design Services As the most critical step in any network deployment or upgrade, the planning and design phase provides the essential foundation for your future network build. DragonWaves planning organization delivers the highest levels of expertise, with extensive experience in the planning and design of thousands of communications networks around the globe.

Planning and Design Benefits

1.Minimize your total cost of ownership through network design optimization 2.An in-depth understanding of your requirements ensures a successful deployment day one 3.Understand alternative designs options and the implications to your network 4.Meet the capacity and resiliency requirements of current and future service offerings Planning and Design Approach planning and design services consist of a comprehensive set of activities involving: 1. requirements gathering 2. architecture selection 3.Product and technology recommendations 4.Detailed network analysis and design 5.License coordination

The planning process. (a) The solution to coastal engineering problems begins with understanding the roles of the engineer as a planner and designer. These roles may be, and often are, embodied in the same person doing sequential tasks. This chapter presents the planning and design processes, the umbrella under which the project evolves from conception through functional detailed technical design phases. Examples of detailed technical designs are found in Part VI of this manual. Although the procedures and examples are those of the USACE, the principles apply to

whomever is doing the planning and designing and follow a logical engineering process regardless of project type, scale, geographic siting, or sponsor. (b) The planning process begins with the questions What is the problem? and What exactly is the project trying to accomplish? As trite as this sounds, these are the most important and the most difficult questions to answer. To achieve a successful coastal project plan and design requires that the engineer must have a completely open mind, one without preconceived notions of the ultimate form of the project or a specific solution to advocate. An example of a pitfall of the planning process is to answer the second question with To design a breakwater without first clearly stating the problem. Is the problem one of navigation difficulties in the vicinity of a harbor, or potential damage to buildings near the shorefront, or water quality problems in a bay? These are symptoms of a problem, but they do not define the problem. (c)An interdisciplinary team approach is recommended in planning coastal projects to ensure the involvement of physical, natural, and social sciences personnel. The disciplines of the coastal project planners should be appropriate to the problems and opportunities identified in the planning process, and range from coastal, geotechnical, structural, and hydraulic engineers through meteorologists, oceanographers, biologists, and geologists, to economists, urban planners, and transportation specialists. Not all disciplines are needed on all studies, but the team leader needs to be cognizant of the possible need for such talents during the project development. Six major planning steps. The planning process consists of six major steps: (1) Specify problems and opportunities. (2) Inventory and forecast conditions if no action is taken. (3) Formulate alternative plans. (4) Evaluate effects. (5) Compare alternative plans.

(6) Select a plan. The design process. (1) Final design. To produce a final design, it is necessary to continue the iterative process begun in the planning of the project. The project is said to be at final design status when all of the objectives are met, and all the stakeholders are satisfied that an optimum design has been reached. If there are any unanswered questions, then the final design has not been reached, and another iteration is necessary. It is current USACE practice to include the final recommended design in the feasibility report, and if approved for construction, no further design work is needed. The engineer can proceed directly to plans and specifications when the project is approved for construction and funds for construction are appropriated. (2) Plans and specifications. The documents required for a contract for construction to be awarded include the plans and specifications for the job. These incorporate any restrictions or other constraints on the contractor, and spell out the accuracy and tolerances appropriate to the job. The procedures for plans and specifications for construction of USACE projects are found in ER 11102-1200, and no further discussion is warranted here.

http://chl.erdc.usace.army.mil/Media/1/9/5/CEM_Part-V_Chap-1.pdf

Introduction of Line Balancing Line and work cell balancing is an effective tool to improve the throughput of assembly lines and work cells while reducing manpower requirements and costs.Assembly Line Balancing, or simply Line Balancing (LB), is the problem of assigningoperations to workstations along an assembly line, in such a way that the assignment beoptimal in some sense. Ever since Henry Fords introduction of assembly lines, LB has been an optimization problem of significant industrial importance: the efficiencydifference between an optimal and a sub-optimal

assignment can yield economies (or waste) reaching millions of dollars per year.LB is a classic Operations Research (OR) optimization problem, having beentackled by OR over several decades. Many algorithms have been proposed for the problem. Yet despite the practical importance of the problem, and the OR efforts thathave been made to tackle it, little commercially available software is available to helpindustry in optimizing their lines. In fact, according to a recent survey by Becker andScholl (2004), there appear to be currently just two commercially available packagesfeaturing both a state of the art optimization algorithm and a user-friendly interface for data management. Furthermore, one of those packages appears to handle only the cleanformulation of the problem (Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem, or SALBP),which leaves only one package available for industries such as automotive. This situationappears to be paradoxical, or at least unexpected: given the huge economies LB cangenerate, one would expect several software packages vying to grab a part of thoseeconomies.It appears that the gap between the available OR results and their dissemination intodays industry, is probably due to a misalignment between the academic LB problemaddressed by most of the OR approaches, and the actual problem being faced by theindustry. LB is a difficult optimization problem (even its simplest forms are NP-hard see Garey and Johnson, 1979), so the approach taken by OR has typically been tosimplify it, in order to bring it to a level of complexity amenable to OR tools. While thisis a perfectly valid approach in general, in the particular case of LB it led to some1

definitions of the problem that ignore many aspects of the real-world problem.Unfortunately, many of the aspects that have been left out in the OR approach are in factcrucial to industries such as automotive, in the sense that any solution ignoring (violating)those aspects becomes unusable in the industry In the sequel, we first briefly recall classic OR definitions of LB, and then reviewhow the actual line balancing problem faced by the industry differs from them, and why asolution to the classic OR problem may be unusable in some industries. Thus, we usedline balancing technique to achieve:

1. the minimization of the number of workstations; 2. the minimization of cycle time; 3. the maximization of workload smoothness; 4. The maximization of work relatedness

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29982776/40/Load-distance-Method,,,,, for load distance method

System layout planning(SLP):This procedure discusses some of the important considerations in planning the internal case layout of a system. This is a step that many people forget about when assembling a new PC, and as a result, they end up wasting a lot of time moving components around after they have been installed. Worse, poor planning increases the chances of problems with the system, especially due to cooling, that may not show up until weeks or months after the system has been installed. This procedure may also help those who have an existing system experiencing overheating problems; using the guidelines here you may want to make changes to how the system is laid out.

Long-term and short-term capacity planning:Long-Term Capacity Planning Over the long term, capacity planning relates primarily to strategic issues involving the firm's major production facilities. In addition, long-term capacity issues are interrelated with location decisions. Technology and transferability of the process to other products is also intertwined with long-term capacity planning. Long-term capacity planning may evolve when short-term changes in capacity are insufficient. For example, if the firm's addition of a third shift to its

current two-shift plan still does not produce enough output, and subcontracting arrangements cannot be made, one feasible alternative is to add capital equipment and modify the layout of the plant (long-term actions). It may even be desirable to add additional plant space or to construct a new facility (long-term alternatives). Short-Term Capacity Planning In the short term, capacity planning concerns issues of scheduling, labor shifts, and balancing resource capacities. The goal of short-term capacity planning is to handle unexpected shifts in demand in an efficient economic manner. The time frame for short-term planning is frequently only a few days but may run as long as six months. Alternatives for making short-term changes in capacity are fairly numerous and can even include the decision to not meet demand at all. The easiest and most commonly-used method to increase capacity in the short term is working overtime. This is a flexible and inexpensive alternative. While the firm has to pay one and one half times the normal labor rate, it foregoes the expense of hiring, training, and paying additional benefits. When not used abusively, most workers appreciate the opportunity to earn extra wages. If overtime does not provide enough short-term capacity, other resource-increasing alternatives are available. These include adding shifts, employing casual or part-time workers, the use of floating workers, leasing workers, and facilities subcontracting.

Firms may also increase capacity by improving the use of their resources. The most common alternatives in this category are worker cross training and overlapping or staggering shifts. Most manufacturing firms inventory some output ahead of demand so that any need for a capacity change is absorbed by the inventory buffer. From a technical perspective, firms may initiate a process design intended to increase productivity at work stations. Manufacturers can also shift demand to avoid capacity requirement fluctuation by backlogging, queuing

demand, or lengthening the firm's lead times. Service firms accomplish the same results through scheduling appointments and reservations.