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o Know the process: It is important that not just the manager but every
employee within the operations knows the details regarding the processes.
o Understand the linkages: Every process will be interconnected and hence it is
important to understand the linkages between the processes.
o Work on the trade-offs: If the process is being created from a cross-functional
background it is useful to discuss functional versus process trade-offs. This will
allow you to make clearer decisions about what is the best balance.
o Teach others about the process: Teach others who may need to supply inputs
or receive outputs about the process. Moving to management by business
process is a learning opportunity for your organization. Process owners and
teams should be expected to have a responsibility for spreading their learning.
Some organizations would see this as part of the general communications
process which facilitates understanding and allows issues to be raised and
answered from any part of the organization.
o Train within the process: Cross-functional customer-facing processes require
new roles, tasks, skills and expertise, often organized around teams. There are
a number of things to consider. Training and development of new skills for
individuals and of the team will bring with it a change in the culture of your
organization.
o Measure the process: Measure for control, improvement and benchmarking,
using a range of financial and non-financial measures. Measurement is
important for managing the interfaces between sub-processes and also
between processes at the same level.
o Manage careers: Careers needs management in the new process-oriented,
possibly flatter organization. Align expectations and aspirations with a different
kind of progression emphasizing cross-skill training and the importance of
gaining wider business experience both within the process and in other
processes.
o Build specialist expertise: In the context of the new organization, take account
of any weakening in this role where the traditional functions in the
organization are made weaker. The process teams will probably need a mix of
specialist skills as well as more general skills.
o Improve the process: This must be done continuously. The world will not
stand still; nor should any members of the team.
OBJECTIVES OF OPERATION MANAGEMENTS
a) CUSTOMER SERVICE
The customer service is the main objective any company because at the
end of the day irrespective of all the strategy, marketing and operations
management if the customer is not happy with the product or the
service then the purpose of the entire enterprise is fallen.
b) RESOURCE UTILISATION
The resources are not used carefully then there are chances that the
production cost increasing and hence the overall profit margin will
reduce and the enterprise objective has failed.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
a. Flexibility
b. The quality
c. Coordination
d. Effectiveness
e. Profitability
f. Measurable
g. The watching
h. Evaluating
i. Concentration
j. Analysis
k. The speed of execution
l. Rapid reaction capacity
m. Structural organizational flexibility
a. PRODUCTION SYSTEM
A production system comprises both the technological elements
(machines and tools) and organizational behavior (division of
labor and information flow). An individual production system is
usually analyzed in the literature referring to a single business,
therefore it's usually improper to include in a given production
system the operations necessary to process goods that are
obtained by purchasing or the operations carried by
the customer on the sold products, the reason being simply that
since businesses need to design their own production systems
this then becomes the focus of analysis, modeling and decision
making (also called "configuring" a production system.
b. METRIC EFFECIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS
Operations strategy concerns policies and plans of use of
the firm productive resources with the aim of supporting long
term competitive strategy. Metrics in operations management can
be broadly classified into efficiency metrics and effectiveness
metrics. Effectiveness metrics involve:
Classic EOQ model: trade-off between ordering cost (blue) and holding cost (red).
Total cost (green) admits a global optimum.
Regarding the traditional pull approach to inventory control, a number of
techniques have been developed based on the work of Ford W. Harris (1913),
which came to be known as the economic order quantity (EOQ) model. This model
marks the beginning of inventory theory, which includes the Wagner-Within
procedure, the newsvendor model, base stock model and the Fixed Time
Period model. These models usually involve the calculation of cycle
stocks and buffer stocks, the latter usually modeled as a function of demand
variability. The economic production quantity. (EPQ) differs from the EOQ model
only in that it assumes a constant fill rate for the part being produced, instead of the
instantaneous refilling of the EOQ model.
SERVICE OPERATION
o Service industries are a major part of economic activity and employment in all
industrialized countries comprising 80 percent of employment and GDP in
the U.S. Operations management of these services, as distinct from
manufacturing, has been developing since the 1970s through publication of
unique practices and academic research. Please note that this section does not
particularly include "Professional Services Firms" and the professional services
practiced from this expertise (specialized training and education within).
o Perishable.
Since services are perishable, they cannot be stored for later use. In
manufacturing companies, inventory can be used to buffer supply and
demand. Since buffering is not possible in services, highly variable demand
must be met by operations or demand modified to meet supply.
o Ownership.
MATHEMATICAL MODELING
o There are also fields of mathematical theory which have found applications in
the field of operations management such as operations research:
mainly mathematical optimization problems and queue theory. Queue theory
is employed in modeling queue and processing times in production systems
while mathematical optimization draws heavily from multivariate
calculus and linear algebra. Queue theory is based on Markov
Chains and stochastic processes. It also worth noticing that computations
of safety stocks are usually based on modeling demand as a normal
distribution and MRP and some inventory problems can be formulated
using optimal control.
o When analytical models are not enough, managers may resort to
using simulation. Simulation has been traditionally done thought the discrete
event simulation paradigm, where the simulation model possesses a state
which can only change when a discrete event happens, which consists of a
clock and list of events. The more recent transaction-level modeling paradigm
consists of a set of resources and a set of transactions: transactions move
through a network of resources (nodes) according to a code, called process.
A control chart: process output variable is modeled by a probability density
function and for each statistic of the sample an upper control line and lower control
line are fixed, when the statistic moves out of bounds, an alarm is given and possible
causes are investigated. In this drawing the statistic of choice is the mean and red
points represent alarm points.
Since real production processes are always affected by disturbances in both
inputs and outputs, many companies implement some form of Quality
management or quality control. The Seven Basic Tools of Quality designation
provides a summary of commonly used tools:
Check sheets
Pareto charts
Ishikawa diagrams (Cause-and-effect diagram)
Control charts
Histogram
Scatter diagram
Stratification
These are used in approaches like Total quality management and Six Sigma.
Keeping quality under control is relevant to both increasing customer satisfaction
and reducing processing waste.
Operations management textbooks usually cover demand forecasting, even
though it is not strictly speaking an operations problem, because demand is related
to some production systems variables. For example, a classic approach in
dimensioning safety stocks requires calculating standard deviation of forecast errors.
Demand forecasting is also a critical part of push systems, since order releases have
to be planned ahead of actual clients orders. Also any serious discussion of capacity
planning involves adjusting company outputs with market demands.
o The Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the British Statute of Anne (1710) are
seen as the origins of patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the
concept of intellectual property.
o The first known use of the term intellectual property dates to 1769, when a
piece published in the Monthly Review used the phrase. The first clear example
of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, when it was used as a heading title in
a collection of essays.
o The German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German
Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of
intellectual property (Schutz des geistigen Eigentums) to the confederation.
When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention (1883)
and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and
also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title,
the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property.
o The organization subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960, and was
succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to
Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the
United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention), and it did
not enter popular usage there until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.
- The existence of intellectual property also provides a useful tool for monitoring
the activities of competitors. Published patent applications, registered designs and
applications for registration of a trade mark can indicate the technical and
commercial direction which a competitor is taking, or thinking of taking. For
example, published patent applications contain technical information relating to
inventions and can indicate the area of technology currently of interest to the
applicant or proprietor. An application for a new trade mark may indicate a new
line of business or change of corporate identity for a company.
o Indirect benefits of generating and protecting your IP
- There are many other benefits of protecting IP, which may not be immediately
obvious. For example, in some countries there are tax breaks and reduced
taxation on profits attributed to products sold that are covered by registered
intellectual property rights, which can directly increase the profits your business
can generate. Often the cost of securing these registered IP rights is very small in
comparison to gains made by the lower tax rate.
DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
o Copyrights can be given to works that truly don’t deserve protection under the
law, and patents can be given to frivolous things. Amazon’s patenting of “pictures
on a white background” is a perfect example of patent frivolity.
CONCLUSION
Intellectual property rights are monopoly rights that grant their holders the
temporary privilege for the exclusive exploitation of the income rights from cultural
expressions and inventions. There must be good reasons for a society to grant such
privileges to some of its individuals, and therefore the proponents of these rights
have provided three widely accepted justifications to defend the interwoven global
intellectual property rights regime we have in place today.
To argue for the abolition of intellectual property rights we have to challenge all
three justifications. Therefore we have discussed whether a creator or inventor can
be considered as the owner of an expression or an innovation because he is the
individual who created or invented something. We have seen that two components
are usually mentioned as justifications for such individual ownership. First, the
natural law based justification which, based on self-ownership and Lockean
appropriation theories, states that the creator is the owner of his creation because he
has put his own labour into his work. In analysing the property concept with John
Christman’s distinction between control and income rights, we have seen that the
amount of labour one puts into a product is not connected to the surplus one may
generate on a market. This does not mean that a seller on a market has not merited
his profit, but one cannot say that he deserves it because of his labour. And we have
also discussed that control rights do not make much sense for abstract objects, as
they are not scarce and do not diminish or lose value when they are used.
Second, the justification by personality rights, which is on one hand based on the
concept from Immanuel Kant that expressions are extensions of one’s personality,
and on the other hand that ideas are owned by the self-owner like his talents, skills
or body parts are owned by him. With the help of Richard Dawkins’ concept of the
meme and Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model, we have seen that it may be
possible that we as individuals are not active agents in the creative process but rather
hosts for the replication of memes, which create, through variation, selection and
heredity, the building blocks for the cultural evolution we can witness when we
observe the development of cultural expressions. Ludwik Fleck’s concept of the
thought collective was another theoretical framework for a discussion of the
interpersonal aspects of creative processes. All in all, we have seen that it is far from
evident that an individual can be considered as the owner of the ideas and
expressions which emerge from his brain and therefore the natural law and
personality-based justifications are contested.
Utilitarians would assert that, even if we accept that the creative process is a collective
process it is still useful to grant these monopoly rights to creators and inventors, as
with these incentives more innovation would happen than without, which is better
for all and better for the worst off. I have replied to this important argument, and we
have seen that different comparative economic studies have revealed that there is
probably more innovation in societies without intellectual property law compared to
societies with such laws in place.
We have also seen that for free market proponents monopoly rights are hardly to be
justified, as they are based on state interference, and that even egalitarians could
subscribe to the abolition of intellectual property rights, as they do not contribute to
more equality.
There are many good reasons to question the justifications for intellectual property
rights and therefore it is time to start the political discussion about the abolition of
these rights to create a world in which intellectual property is common property.