Course DescriptionThis course is intended to provide an overview of the operations management function within an organization – highlighting how the operations can be strategically designed while also demonstrating how they are managed and improved. While core OM concepts are applicable to both the manufacturing and service environments, specific emphasis is placed on the service sector since it now accounts for a significant proportion of economic activity in industrialized countries. In general, the course will have a strategic flavor to it where you will be exposed to the array of techniques used by managers in the operations function. Course ObjectivesThis course is designed to achieve multiple objectives which include (but are not limited to):
1) Gaining an understanding of the strategic importance of operations management
2) Developing an understanding of the nature of operations in the context of the overall organization
3) Identifying and analyzing the major issues involved in the design and management of operational systems
4) Gaining an understanding of the decision making approaches developed to address the pertinent operations issues
5) Altering your personal views of the operations function as it resides within the overall context of a business entity
- Suppose you have a two-activity sequential process: Task 1 —> Task 2.
Task 1 has a throughput capacity of 10 units per hour; task 2 has a throughput capacity of 15 units per hour.
What is the cycle time for task 1 (in hours)? - Suppose you have a two-activity sequential process: Task 1 —> Task 2.
Task 1 has a throughput capacity of 10 units per hour; task 2 has a throughput capacity of 15 units per hour.
What is the utilization for task 2? Enter answer as a number between 0 and 1 (e.g., 50% should be entered as 0.50). - For the next 5 questions, consider the following process flowchart for a hypothetical quick service restaurant. Throughput times are listed in parentheses after the name of each activity. For all questions, answer using customers and/or minutes as your units of measure. There are no inventory buffers between any stations; instead, blocking occurs for upstream activities.
Take Order (6.1 minutes) —-> Prepare drinks (4.7 minutes) —-> Prepare food (7.9 minutes) —–> Assemble order (5.2 minutes) —-> Take payment (5.5 minutes).
Each activity uses its own workers & equipment. The Prepare Food activity can handle 2 customers at once; each of the others can handle 1 customer at a time.
What is the throughput time (in minutes) for the entire process (from the start of the take order activity through the end of the take payment activity)?
- What is the cycle time for the prepare food activity?
- What is the actual throughput rate out of the Take Payment station?
- What is the actual throughput rate out of Task 4 (in customers per hour)?
- Consider a housekeeper at a hotel. The housekeeper cleans rooms in batches – it batches rooms by floor (10 rooms per floor). Each room take 20 minutes to clean. Before cleaning each floor, the housekeeper must setup their cleaning materials by restocking cleaning supplies & linens, emptying the vacuum, changing mop heads, etc.; this takes 30 minutes. Suppose for this example that a housekeeper blocks off the entire floor when setting up and cleaning the rooms on that floor.
Use this information to answer the next two questions:
What is the throughput time for cleaning a floor? Enter your answer in minutes. - What is the throughput capacity for housekeeping, in rooms per minute?