Operations management

Operations Management is the management field which designs, builds, operates and improves the productive system which produces the company’s products and services. It is sometimes limited to the operation of the company’s factories or service provider operations, but this is a misconception as operations management encompasses much more including many facets of the supply chain, such as appropriate use of inventory, available capacity & production management, plant and equipment maintenance and customer interaction. Sound operations management is crucial to ensuring an efficient supply chain which can deliver products to customers competitively in the time frame and manner they require.

Operations management involves several direct management levels of the company’s operations including people and culture management as well as strategic and business decision making. An important part of operations management is also evaluating the success of goals and strategies put in place to manage operations and the business, this is done by a wide variety of KPI’s. Some of these include: OEE, Days inventory, capacity utilization, lead times, downtime / plant up time and first time through yield

Operation managers usually have an engineering or commercial background, and may have other business qualifications. They usually have had experience in manufacturing/processing plants, as team leaders to production/plant managers, or experience in a service operations role. Some operations managers and engineers will also have had some lean manufacturing/production education.