2 Name – Sampada Mowade Campus – ICEM Roll No. – 71142
Que.1 What is the role of operations manager?
Ans. Following are the roles of operations manager: 1. Product Design: Operations manager’s responsibility is to ensure that the products sold to consumers meet their needs, as well as match current market trends. Consumers are more interested in the quality of the product more than the quantity, and the organization should create systems that ensure the products produced meet the needs of the consumer. 2. Forecasting The manager relies on past and present data on the uptake of the company’s products to determine future trends in consumption. The forecasts help the company know the volume of products needed to meet the market demand. 3. Supply Chain Management The operations manager manages the supply chain process by maintaining control of inventory management, the production process, distribution, sales, and sourcing of suppliers to supply required goods at reasonable prices. 4. Delivery Management The operations manager is in charge of delivery management. The manager ensures that the goods are delivered to the consumer in a timely manner. They must follow up with consumers to ensure that the goods delivered are what the consumers ordered and that they meet their functionality needs. 5. Organizational Abilities If a manager is not organized, uncompleted tasks will pile up, important documents will get lost in the process, and a majority of the time will be spent finding lost documents that could be easily accessible had the manager been organized. Good organization skills can increase production efficiency and help the manager save time. 6. Coordination An operations manager needs to have good coordination by knowing how to integrate resources, activities, and time to ensure proper use of the resources toward the achievement of the organization’s goals. 7. People Skills Most of the responsibilities of an operations manager involve dealing with people. This means that they must know how to relate with the employees, outside stakeholders, and other members of senior management. An operations manager should know how to manage the fine lines with other colleagues by knowing how to communicate, listen, and relate to them on professional and personal levels. 8. Tech-savvy In this age of rapidly advancing technologies, an operations manager needs to have an affinity for technology in order to be in a position to design processes that are both efficient and tech-compliant. Modern organizations are becoming increasingly tech-dependent in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
Que 2. What are your recommendations to IKEA management for future
business strategy? Develop customer focus in each step of the process and train employees to provide the best customer satisfaction. IKEA depends on its consumers, and it needs to prove to the consumers that they can depend on IKEA as well. Customer focus is very important internally as well as externally in the workings of the organization. Leadership: The international size of the organization makes it difficult for them to manage and lead the process. Leadership is required for each different store and all the leaders need to have a similar set of rules, aims and objectives. This can be done by training each leader of the store together. With the values that needs to be used in the organization. Process based quality management. One theory of quality management states that if each process in the organization deals with the optimum use of resources and time, the overall outlook of the organization will be much different. Decision making approach of the organization needs to change. The management needs to realize that they can no longer be over cautious in their approach if they want to gather all the market share and potential sales if they continue being conservative. They need information that is correct, and they need to work slowly because of their mere size but they also need to take an aggressive role in this slow recession filled economy in order to survive and compete. Continual improvement in quality: Quality management is not a onetime approach, the organization must imbibe it into its day-to-day workings, control the quality and give feedback on the improvements done. The constant feedbacks would be supplied along with the advantages that the organization achieved due to the process of quality management.
Que 3. How can Operations Management integrate with Business Strategies?
The role of operations strategy is to provide a plan for the operations
function so that it can make the best use of its resources. Operations strategy specifies the policies and plans for using the organization's resources to support its long-term competitive strategy. Operations management is one of the most crucial factors for a business or an organisation. With the help of operations management, an organisation can enhance its key aspect, which is to provide services or products in accordance with the demands and needs of the customers. Operations management include effective and efficient maintenance of processes regarding the design and management of products and services along with supply chain management. IKEA mainly manufactures types of furniture, such as varieties of beds, bookshelves, sofas, and tables along with bathroom articles and kitchen utensils. The company consists of certain departments which are responsible for the effective management and efficient functioning. IKEA is an organisation that produces furniture and some operations management decisions that are involved with this organisation are purchasing wood and fabric, hiring and training workers, planning the location and layout of the furniture factory, as well as purchasing cutting tools and other fabrication equipment. These operations management decisions help the organisation to produce furniture, which is affordable, functional, and attractive. The primary areas of operation management that are focused by the organisation are quality management, supply chain management and cost. Operation management can help in various aspects of business such as – reduction in cost, increase in efficiency, reduction of manpower, improving moral of employees, etc. Operation management can help in carrying out these aspects effectively. Supply chain is also an important part of the IKEA operations and with integrating operations management successfully IKEA can and is operating with very good capabilities.