Introduction to Operations Management - I

Prof. B Mahadevan
Summary – Productivity Improvements in Operations

Productivity is a very important issue and an element of business competitiveness today. Every
organization, be it manufacturing or service––whatever it is––all the time talk about how do I cut
cost, how do I employ fewer people, how do I manage efficiently with fewer resources––this is the
conversation going on. We started this module with the notion of what is called productivity
paradox. Then we moved on, we talked about the notion of a value stream. The reason or the need
for an organization to understand it has to create value adding activities, it has to add value to the
customer––so, we discussed that Idea. So, in this journey of creating the value stream, making sure
that there are value-adding activities, which seems to be the primary way for productivity
management, we introduced several tools.
We talked about the philosophy of lean, we talked about Just In Time and TQM, we talked about pull
type scheduling, we talked about process mapping as a way by which we even understand how
much value our processes are adding. And then we also talked about how one can use information
from a process mapping to launch a project-by-project improvement. We talked about the power of
visual control boards. How one can use these kinds of ideas, which can be deployed, in our journey
of productivity improvement. Of course, we also talked about challenges. While the ideas looked
very simple, there are some challenges in making it happen. Productivity improvement is all about
investing in a habit of being excellent. We talked about all those issues in this module. I hope you
will find these issues not only interesting but also very relevant to your work setting. I am sure you
will be able to appreciate some of them and identify opportunities to make use of it to make your
organization become more competitive because that's what everybody is asking for today.

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