This is an academic portal of the Department of Management Science and Technology at Athens University of Economics and Business. The topic covered is Operations Management.
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Have access to selected journal papers
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Have access to selected MSc and PhD Theses
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What is Operations Management?
Operations Management (OM) is concerned with the production, inventory and delivery of products and services. OM is a function that enables enterprises to achieve their goals through efficient acquisition and utilization of resources. It considers the acquisition, development and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their customers want. To this end, OM covers the design, planning and management of all facilities, processes and activities required to transform resources into goods and services.
Operations Managers control most organizational resources such as people, money, materials, machines and buildings, used in manufacturing or in providing services. It is of primary importance that these resources are used efficiently and effectively, in order to achieve high levels of productivity and competitiveness.
The efficient and effective management of these resources requires the kinds of skills and knowledge provided by OM concepts, tools and techniques. The purvey of OM ranges from strategic to tactical and operational levels. Strategic issues may include determining the size and location of manufacturing plants, deciding the structure of service networks and designing technology supply chains. Tactical issues may include plant layout and
equipment selection. Finally, operational issues may include production scheduling, inventory management, quality control and material handling.
OM main topics are:
Product Design: specifies which materials are to be used, determines dimensions and tolerances, defines the appearance of the product and sets standards for performance.
Service Design: specifies what physical items, sensual benefits and psychological benefits the customer is to receive from the service.
Process Design: for products/services deals with the processes by which they are produced. It involves compiling and understanding the products’ requirements, converting the requirements into engineering specifications and producing plans that marshal the materials, equipment and people needed to make and deliver the products.
Quality Management & Control: includes an in-depth study of management and statistical techniques employed in the analysis, design and implementation of quality assurance and control systems in manufacturing and service organizations. Statistical process control is the application of statistical techniques to determine whether the output of a process conforms to the product or service design.
Project Management: involves the coordination of tasks, people,
organizations and other resources to deliver all the work required to complete a project within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints.
Project management includes developing a project plan, defining project goals and objectives, specifying tasks or how goals will be achieved, determining the needed resources and associating budgets and timelines for completion. It also includes implementing the project plan along with careful controls to stay on the "critical path", that is, to ensure the plan is being managed according to plan. Project management usually follows major phases (with various titles for these phases), including feasibility study, project planning, implementation, evaluation and support/maintenance.
Capacity, Location & Facility Layout: capacity planning refers to the processes of adjusting the capacity of an organization at two levels, namely long-terms capacity plans which deal with the investment in new facilities and equipment and short term capacity plans which focus on work-force size, overtime and so on. Facility location denotes the processes of determining a geographic site for a company’s operations. Finally, layout involves a set of decisions about the physical arrangement of economic activity
centers within a facility.
Supply Chain Management: includes a set of interconnected nodes integrating inventory flows and stocks from raw materials to finished goods provided to final customers. The goal of SCM is the overall system-wide coordination of inventory stock and flows to improve inventory efficiency throughout the system.
Inventory Management: enables an organization to manage their inventories effectively in order to meet or exceed customers' expectations of product availability while maximizing net profits or minimizing costs.
Operations Planning & Scheduling: involves the processes of allocating resources to accomplish specific tasks. There are two types of scheduling in manufacturing ad service
organizations, namely work-force scheduling which determines when employees work and operations scheduling which assigns jobs to machines or workers to jobs.
Purchasing & Materials Management: examines the analysis and planning, of methods that are associated with the buying functions in business. Moreover, it focuses on the principal issues involved in the procurement of raw materials, components, equipment, operating supplies, and services.
OM can be applied to all types of enterprises including manufacturers, retails, wholesalers and all kinds of profit and non-profit service
organizations.
Why study Operations Management?
Graduate students in OM are employed by manufacturing companies, management consultancies, transport companies, telecommunication service providers, the energy sector, SOEs and other public or private service organizations. Most graduates are expected to rise to senior management levels.
Students of other disciplines, such as marketing, human resource management, finance and engineering, often take courses in OM to broaden their education and
enhance the prospects of progress in their subsequent careers.
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