Operations Management Ok, I Looked at Them.

Operations Management

Ok, I looked at them. It wasn't stated whether I should do anything more than look. The positions were for Cross Dock Expert, IT Operations Management and an internship for Supply Chain/Operations Management.

By definition, management and research are quite different. Research deals with the theories and practice of management from an external perspective. The researcher is the observer, analyst and thinker. By contrast, operations management is internal, where the manager is directly responsible for the act of management, rather than gaining information about operations to be processed via research methods. The researcher studies; the manager does. Management means to allocate resource to enact a transformation process.

In a fast food restaurant, the labor (transforming) produces meals (transformed), taking what is theoretically food and transforming it into something that people eat. In a hotel, labor (transforming) transforms the space (transformed), as it is the rooms that are the asset converted from empty space into temporary lodgings. In a university, instructors (transforming) process students (transformed), giving them the gift of fine educations. At a food retailer, the labor and space (transforming) combine to move the goods (transformed) out of the store. As with hotels, there is a high level of labor involved to transform the space, but the space is a critical resource. At a car manufacturer, robots and some labor (transforming) processes inputs (usually manufacturer components) into cars. The components are the transformed resource.

4. The process view of the organization holds that the organization is a set of processes by which inputs are transformed into outputs. In this idea, the organization is broken down into input/process/output sets. The processes can be understood at different levels, including the individual processes, the functional processes and the cross-functional processes. The way that the organization organizes these different process will determine how effective the organization will be.

6. Heterogeneity refers to things being different from one another. With a service organization, what this means is that every customer and every transaction is a little bit different. This view is opposite to something like a manufacturing organization, where the company might produce standardized products. For example, a seamstress in Bangladesh might sew the same type of socks all day every day -- this is standardized output and therefore it is relatively easy for the organization to develop standardized production procedures. In many companies, robots do the work because there is such a high level of standardization.