OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations Management

Operations Management

Institution background

Southwestern University is a university located in private Georgetown, Texas, United States. Southwestern was founded in 1840 and is the oldest university in Texas. The school is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. The university offers 40 degrees of Bachelor of Arts, science, fine arts and music as well as interdisciplinary programs and pre-professionals.

Introduction

Operations management relates to the design and management of services, supply chains and products, and their supply. The focus of operations management is to make efficient delivery of goods and services to clients possible through development, acquisition and utilizations of various resources. Operations management takes place at all levels in the organization. For instance, it can take place at the tactical, operations and even strategic level. Management of operations is responsible for the production of goods and services of the organization, from being responsible for decision making or in the operations function and processing systems are used (Goltz, 2004). Many companies around the globe are focusing on employing operations management as a tool to provide their valued customers with better products and services, so that they can get their customer lifetime value. There are several issues related to the field of operations management.

Operations management is an attempt to improve plant management and its layout, better control of production scheduling, rapid inventory management, expedition of production processes and better equipment maintenance. On a broad scale, we can say that the goal of operations management is to achieve effectiveness and efficiency of different operations of the organization. On a very broad scale, there are five purposes of operations management. These are flexibility, speed, quality, cost management and dependability (Robert, 2002).

The paper summaries case study of Southwestern University. It discusses the problems that were being faced by the president before they implemented the operations management technique, as well as details about how the technique was implemented in the organization, and what benefits were accrued from the implementation (Daniel, 2008). There are various step involved in the implementation of the operations management techniques that are discussed hereunder. Moreover, the paper makes suggestions about how the company can make full use of deploying the operations management technique.

Discussion

Question No 1.

The economic order quantity seeks to find the amount of order that minimizes total inventory cost of the company. One of the tools used to determine the optimal amount of request for an inventory item is the model of economic order quantity (EOQ). The model of economic order quantity is based on three fundamental assumptions: the first is that the company knows what is the annual use of items found in inventory, second that the frequency with which the company uses the inventory is not varies with time and finally that orders are placed to replace stocks of inventory are received at the exact moment when inventories are depleted (Tan, 2009).

Economic order quantity is one that minimizes the total cost function; mathematically the minimum total cost occurs when the cost of ordering and maintenance costs are ...