Operations Management: Organization and Analysis

In this first module, you will be introduced to the instructors and the course. Next, you will learn about the significance of operations management, and how to formulate and implement an operations strategy that is aligned with the business strategy and with market requirements.

In this module, you will learn about types of process arrangements and the implications of adopting each one. You will learn to analyze the performance of processes and of the activities within the processes, and to recognize the impacts of variability on processes.

In this module, we will learn about the importance of inventory management in operations settings. Inventories entail several costs such as holding and ordering costs. These costs depend on key decisions such as order quantity and reorder point. We will learn how the different types of costs depend on inventory decisions. We will also discuss the trade-offs associated with inventory decisions and how to make optimal decisions related to inventory management. This module is focused on simple inventory scenarios where demand is fixed and known. The learnings from this module are important because it provides key basics of inventory management which are important in learning and mastering more complex decision scenarios

In this module, we extend the learnings from the previous module to more complex scenarios of inventory management, namely, when demand is uncertain and cannot be predicted with certainty. First, we learn how to measure uncertainty in demand using demand distributions – particularly the Normal distribution, which is the more common demand distribution used in practice. Second, we will learn about the decision tradeoffs in managing inventory with uncertainty, namely, between service levels and costs of inventory. The key decisions related to managing inventory with demand uncertainty are order quantity, reorder point, safety or buffer stock levels, and frequency of inventory review and ordering. Upon completion of this module, we will gain knowledge and expertise in making these decisions optimally using different inventory policies such as continuous review policy and periodic review policy. This module is important for managing inventories in most operations settings in an efficient and effective manner.