Operational Management

Business operations are the heartbeat of any firm, their efficiency and effectiveness have a direct impact on the bottom line, but don't forget the processes themselves also need to work internally and externally.

What is Operations Management?

Operational management is a term covering a broad range of activities in business. In essence operational management can be summed up as the management of the business processes, resources and activities that action, transform, produce, or deliver and the management of the resources required.

Operations Management is core to every business effecting just about everything, and focuses on managing the business processes and resources to produce and deliver the products and or services, be they for internal or external delivery. A great deal of focus is on the efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Therefore, operations management often includes measurement and analysis of the processes. Ultimately, the nature of how operations management is carried out in an business is very much dependent on the products or services in the business.

What is a process?

A process is a repeatable action or set of actions, usually sequential, that are applied to an input to carry out some form of change to produce a measurable change or output.  This can applied to a physical product or something less physical such as information.

For example, in a physical sense, assembly may be a process - taking a set of pieces (the inputs), screwing together (assembly actions), to produce an assembled product (the output).  In an informational sense, receiving an order request (the input), an administrator enters on a billing system (the action) to create a warehouse pick list, delivery note and invoice (the outputs).