Case Study Of Operations And Process Management

1. Introduction

In this ever-changing and hyper-competitive business world which we live in today, businesses are faced with stiffer competitions and bear higher risks on negative consequences as compared to businesses years before. For an organization to survive in this era, not only do they need to produce innovative and state-of-the-art products, intense competition on factors like product quality/efficiency and also, customer-business relationship are inevitable. The popularization of Operations and process Management (OM) in recent years is largely attributed to its functionality on helping the companies achieve their desired objectives. Business leaders have realized the importance and the effectiveness that operations management can

For the process perspective at the level of the supply network, it can be complex due to the large numbers of suppliers and customers. The boundaries of the operation’s supply chain can be very wide ranging from procurement of the raw materials to the disposal of products. It is also always changing as suppliers may change from time to time while in some operations, some new customers may be won over but may result in the loss of some existing customers.

For the level of operation, the operations segment of business is an input-transformation-output system which transforms different inputs to a range of products through an arrangement of processes. Products can be in the form of tangible (physical) or intangible (services) or a hybrid of both. This is important as customers nowadays, demand for both elements to be present in a product.

For the level of individual process, they are considered as non-operations functions but they too, have their own sets of customers and suppliers just like whole operations. It can be viewed as an internal network of individual processes which interact with each

Operation Strategy

The pattern of decisions and action that shape the long-term vision, objectives and capabilities of the operations and its contribution to the overall strategy of a business is known as the operation strategy (Slack, N/ Brandon-Jones,A/ Johnston,R/ Betts, A (2015)). Operation strategy can determine the success or failure of a business and is sceptical to being heavily influenced by poor operational implementation.

Operation management objectives can be either broad which encompasses objectives like society, customers, employees, shareholders and suppliers or specific, which would include quality, delivery, flexibility, cost, innovation and sustainability. There is also the trade-off model which suggests for manager to look into the need to prioritize and make a choice between competitive priorities (Boyer and Lewis, 2002).

5. Challenges for OM in today’s competitive business environment

As the global business competitions intensify, coupled with the quantum leap in technological advancement, many companies have its operation management function impacted. With the increased use of information technology, the new trend for customers is to seek for operations management to produce high-quality products at a lower cost and producing environmentally friendly products through green-manufacturing due to the depleting of our natural