In a business environment where two firms offering the same services or products, you may find that one company is more efficient than the other is. The success of any business entity is dependent on many factors, which are out of the scope of this piece of writing. Operations management is one of the factors influencing the success of businesses.
Operations management is a process in which input resources such as labor and other materials used in an organization subsystems are combined to produce a value-added product or services in a controlled manner as that organization’s policies stipulate. It is, therefore, that department or part of an organization that deals with the transformation of various inputs into the desired outputs concerning the set quality levels by an organization.
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Previously, operations management was only used in manufacturing production. This included the production of tangible goods only. However, the scope of the system has expanded with time to include service systems. This is because operations effect every functional department in an organization stretching from procurement of input resources to marketing of the final product (Bayraktar et al., 2007). Operations management is an applied discipline, which responds to the complexity of issues as they arise in the industry. It is for this reasons that theoretical analysis tends to lag behind when the innovations had been made by the practitioners, especially when the practitioners do not document and share their applied techniques. Some of the reasons that have influenced the development of operations management include:
The Shift of focus from cost to quality
Operations Management first came to be from 1890 through 1990 following the works of great scholars of management like W. Taylor, L. Gantt, and co. The focus during this error was to improve labor productivity. During this period of ‘Scientific Management,' motion studies, production control, layout, queuing theory and time were some of the techniques used to improve the productivity of labor. After the Second World War to 1960s, the focus was on the development of algorithms to solve production optimization problems in the various areas of production.
Technology
The introduction of computers and their use to perform repetitive tasks in an organization led to solutions to challenges such as production control. Since then to date, databases and information systems have become an inevitable tool in solving problems of handling big data. It is this period of the computer that operations management has been recognized and accepted as a functional field in an organization. Heavy use of computers as a business tool has shifted attention to the development of advanced integrated systems to and changed the attention of the ancient implementation of mass production to benefit from economies of scale to modern production aimed at reducing the cost of production by cutting unnecessary labor.
Task environment: stakeholders
In the past, shareholders were the only recognized stakeholders of an organization. The primary focus was how the shareholders would maximize their profits (that is the goal of any business enterprise to date). In most cases, the cost of products and services were used to satisfy customers whose choice of goods were limited. However, after 1970, the client was considered as a stakeholder with the shift from cost to quality. The cost of a product or service was attached to the quality of that product/service. Customers become the focus of operations management and a very important stakeholder this shifted the notion to “sell what customers want” from “sell what I manufacture.”
How operations Management role is applied in achieving an organization’s strategy.
Operations management is mostly concentrated in the management of the sources, which are directly taking a share in the production process or achieving the goals of an organization. Some processes to produce the desire results/output usually combine these sources. These resources include but not limited to people, materials, technologies and information.
The transformation process includes drafts of planning and control, operations systems, and activities improvement that is essential for providing products to the customers. Operations management is used in the design of activities to set up a procedure on which action precedes what activity, supervise to ensure the activities flow as designed and take any corrective mechanism to improve the system if the final product does not meet the set quality or goals as previously designed (Petra & Marcela,2011)
Any organization, therefore, has to make its organization goal after a thorough scrutiny and understanding of its operational management systems to set goals and objectives, which can be realized.
In Summary, Operations management is an essential system in any organization. An organization can gain a greater competitive advantage over other business that produces similar products and services by knowledge and understanding of its subsystems, which will help it, achieve its goals. There is a need for continuous efforts to monitor the research base of operations management against evolving modern realities and complications. This will help in coming up with more effective and sufficient ways in coming up with more cost-effective and sufficient methods in the utilization of the scarce resources during the production process.
References
Bayraktar, Erkan & Jothishankar, M.C. & Tatoglu, Ekrem & Wu, Teresa. (2007 ). Evolution of operations management: Past, present and future. Management Research News . 30. 843-871. 10.1108/01409170710832278. http://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2016.00101
Petra, H.; Marcela D. (2011) Operations Management as Practice of Organizations' Strategic Management in Relation to the Environment. 2 011 I nternational Conference on Financial Management and Economics IPEDR , Singapore
