MABAO, GIANNE RUTH July 24, 2021

BSA 2-13 BUMA 20093 – Prof. Reynaldo T. Barrera

Activity 2

Lesson 1 – Operations and Productivity Assessment

1. Define operations management and the functions associated with it.

Operations Management, or OM, may be defined as the management of

business systems, processes, or practices that create goods and provide services.
Supervision is given to these business systems to make the highest efficiency
possible regarding the materials and labor conversion into goods and services
within the organization.

Moreover, operations management functions include the following:

• Forecasting involves the making of predictions and possible events using past or
historical data. This method facilitates the critical decision-making of the entity
concerning the consumer’s demand and the analysis of the organization’s
strengths and weaknesses.

• Capacity planning focuses on measuring how much a business organization can

achieve, produce, and sell for a given or specific time. Capacity planning also
entails analyzing what the company will make and what the expected demand will
be.

• Scheduling is responsible for assigning tasks to the company’s personnel and

even to the pieces of machinery and equipment. Therefore, scheduling refers to
the timing and use of the available resources within the organization.
• Managing inventories is the process that is responsible for the management of
an organization’s stocks – in ordering, storing, moving, arranging, counting, and
maintaining thereof.

• Assuring quality focus on ensuring the fulfillment of requirements as part of

production consistency. It is the measure for the accomplishment of standards that
are needed to maintain excellence.

• Motivating employees is vital for continually energizing, directing, and sustaining

the staff and personnel efforts to achieve the company’s goals and objectives.
Hence, this is about the operations manager’s responsibility to encourage their
subordinates to be well-productive and effective.

• Deciding to locate facilities or location strategy is the geographical positioning

of an operation relative to the input resources and other operations.

2. Compare the operations management in a company that produces goods

with a company that offers services.

A company that produces goods and a company that offers services have
distinct characteristics from one another. The distinguished aspects:
tangible/intangible nature of the output, production, consumption, nature of work
or job, customer participation in conversion, measurement of performance, quality
of production, and inventory accumulated.

For further discussion, in manufacturing, the outputs produced are more

tangible products. On the other hand, service involves intangible work. In service,
the production and consumption of the outcomes co-occur, while the consumption
of outputs for manufacturing happens over time. Moreover, in manufacturing, jobs
are done with less labor but more equipment, and there is no customer
participation in the conversion or production process. In contrast, jobs in service
use more labor and equipment and with direct consumer contact. In
transformation, the customers have frequent participation in the process. For the
last comparison, manufacturing uses sophisticated methods for measuring
production activities and resource consumptions, while services use elementary
methods.