What is Operation Management?
Operation management refers to a supervisory body set up in a business to ensure efficiency and oversee the day-to-day activities of the business. Operations involved handling strategic issues. It is a major process in an organisation along with marketing, human resources, finance and supply chain.
Objectives and Responsibilities of Operations Management
The major objective of operations is to minimise waste by using as few resources as needed to effectively provide for the needs of the customers.
Operations involve converting inputs (in form of raw materials, labour and energy) into outputs ( goods and services) to maximise profit and avoid waste.
Operations management involves a lot of decision-making. Some of the decision-making processes involved include:
• Raw material Acquisition:
One of the major responsibilities in operations is the acquisition of raw materials required for product production. Operation management requires making the best choices in the raw materials selection process by choosing the best material required, avoiding low quality and providing high efficiency while minimising cost.
• Delivery Management:
Operations management involves ensuring that customers receive their goods on time and that the goods meet the standards or requirements of the customer. Operations are also involved in receiving feedback from customers and forwarding them to the relevant departments.
• Quality Management and Supply Control:
Another major role of the responsibility of operations is to oversee processes and procedures required in production and to ensure that they achieve the standard market quality. Operations Management also involves controlling how much product is produced based on the market demand to avoid waste.
• Product Planning and Design:
Operations are involved in the production planning and designing of products. This requires creativity and the ability to always come up with new designs. Operations management ensures that products designed meet customers' needs/expectations and follow the latest market trends.
• Operations strategy:
This involves all the decisions made from the production stage to the delivery stage. Operations strategy refers to the set of guidelines used in the planning, analysing and execution of a company's operation. An operation strategy should always recognize and implement cost-effective processes for producing and distributing goods and services.
Qualities of a good Operations Manager
• Proper Decision-making skills:
Since a major role of operations is decision-making, an operations manager must be good at decision-making. An operation manager should not be indecisive. Being able to quickly make proper decisions is essential for an operation manager.
• Ability to analyse issues and provide a solution:
A good operations manager must have the capacity to analyse the pressing difficulties and profer solutions to increase the efficacy of operations.
• Great people skills:
A lot of the process of operations involves people, therefore a major responsibility of an operation manager includes interacting with people. An operations manager must be tolerant and patient because they have to deal with diverse people (both employees, stakeholders and customers).
• Organisational skills:
An operations manager is involved in a lot of projects and so they require organisation skills to prevent distractions. An operations manager must be able to complete all their different projects without losing focus.
• Technology Know-how:
Being tech-savvy is a great characteristic that an operation manager must possess. The current business world has become technology-dependent because it promotes effectiveness and efficiency therefore a good operations manager must have a good knowledge of technology and its application in their industry.
• Capacity to predict the market:
A good operations manager must have foresight. An operation manager is expected to predict the demands of a set of products. An Operations Manager must be able to anticipate future events from the study of past data.
Steps to improve business operations
• Follow trends:
A business should be able to recognise the new ideas and trends in the industry. These trends can vary from government fees to innovations. They should be able to implement these new trends and help the business stay relevant.
• Increase Productivity:
The operations management should find new tools, equipment and software technologies to promote and facilitate business cooperation
• Measure performance
Before a business can measure its performance, it must first set goals. Therefore the operations management should set realistic and achievable goals with precise targets. And then create a structure that helps them measure their current state with their company goals.
Additional Resources
Thank you for reading Bridger’s guide on Operations Management. To keep learning and developing your knowledge of running businesses and supply-chain, we highly recommend the additional Bridger resources below:
Starting a business
Working capital with supply-chain