This course is about managing the operations of an organization. It is about managing how any work is done. What you learn in this course will be applicable to broadly speaking, manufacturing and service organizations. In fact, managing how work is done applies to all types of organizations, including non-profits, manufacturing companies, service companies, and consulting companies. Within each of the topic areas of this course, that is, in the four modules, you will learn about strategy formulation decisions usually made at the upper management level as well as process implementation decisions, which are usually made at the level of middle management and frontline employees. The four modules will uncover decisions in four areas. In each area you will be introduced to underlying thinking, underlying principles, some general ways of thinking about decisions as well as some practical techniques, some frameworks, some analytical tools that you can apply to make decisions. First, operation strategy. This area deals with top line decisions by upper management, working with marketing and business strategy to decide what market do we want to be in? Then, who are our customers? What are their needs and how can we best fulfill those needs? At the end of this module you will be able to recognize trade-offs, the realities of making compromises when formulating strategy, and you will learn ways to break those trade-offs, overcome the need to compromise for the organization to perform well in multiple dimensions for its customers. Second, process configurations and metrics. You will learn to apply the process view, the horizontal view of organizations. The process view means we focus on how things flow from the start of any work to its completion. Whether it is for assembling a cell phone or for a patient's doctor's visit or for processing an insurance claim. From a long-term strategy formulation perspective, you will learn to evaluate different arrangements. We call these configurations for the multiple steps in a process. Then getting into a more detailed and analytical view of steps in an operation, you will learn about analyzing processes using measurements such as throughput time, flow rate, and capacity, and the interconnections among them. This will also help you to evaluate what happens when you change one aspect of a multi-step process, the effects that has on the rest of the process. Next, in inventory management, we will start with developing an understanding of the cost of inventory management. You will learn the thinking behind inventory decisions, such as, what should a fashion retailer be considering when deciding how many dresses to order for this season, or a purchasing manager in a hospital deciding how many gloves or surgical gowns to stock. This conceptual understanding will become the basis for you to be able to evaluate inventory management policies. While you will learn the basic versions of such techniques, these basic versions serve as the foundational models for the more advanced, more complicated versions for inventory management. Four, Supply chain management. In this module, we will take you beyond the boundaries of an organization to suppliers and buyers. You will learn to evaluate outsourcing decisions, deciding whether to make something in-house or find an external supplier. You will also learn to align the type of supply chain with your operation strategy. You will learn about the importance of supply chain partnerships. You will see the impact that a disruption in one part of the supply chain can have on the others. Overall, through these four modules, you will learn about the most important decisions for designing operations that match the needs of your business. This course will give you an introduction to fundamental topics, give you a sense of the basics and operations management. Now, depending on your interests and your career path, you will be able to use this knowledge that you gain in three ways. First, you can build upon these basics to learn more about process analytics and optimization. That is, you may go more in-depth into the analytics part of this course. Second, as an executive in a different area such as marketing or finance, you will be able to have better conversations with the operations management executives. You will speak their language and make them understand yours. Third, as an executive in the C-suite, you will be able to use your understanding of operations to take your organization to greater levels of success.
