MONITORING & CONTROLLING OPERATIONS

By Dr. Simon Tembo

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 COURSE OUTLINE
4 Hours Lectures + 3 Hours Lab./Tutorial per
Week
1) Management
2) Engineering as Business
3) Planning
4) Organizing & Coordinating
5) Staffing
6) Leading
7) Marketing
8) Monitoring & Controlling Operations

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 MONITORING AND CONTROLLING OPERATIONS:
 Purpose, Cost control, Progress control,
 Progress measurement benchmarks;
 Forecasting, Progress reporting,
 Progress meetings,
 Controlling/managing changes.
 On the surface, companies from industry sectors such as
mining, construction, manufacturing, and service providers
would appear to be very different.
 Certainly, the physical activities involved and the resulting
products are different.
 At a conceptual level, however, each of these companies can
be viewed as a complex system trying to utilize its resources to
maximize its performance.
 The ability of managers and workers to control and monitor
the operations within such a system has a great impact on its
performance.
 Three issues related to controlling and monitoring operations:
 architectures to organize those operations,
 artificial intelligence techniques for scheduling those operations, and
 commercial software to implement monitoring and control.
 The principal application focus is manufacturing, but the ideas
can be applied to a wide range of complex systems.
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