Operations management is an area of business concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resource as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labour and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and services).- Source Wiki
Perfectly said by Wiki...applies not just to Mfg industry even more often to "Services" Industry too. Services can be in terms of IT , Hardware support, Software product support or an Infrastructure Management Support (IMS). Here, let us limit our discussion to IT support not developing products, but I will try to make as much as analogy with Mfg industry so the criticality of this function is well understood.
It just that in Services the raw materials are human beings, inputs are customer queries, customer requirements, customer problems and produced output is the customer service.
The Essential parts of Operations Management are
1. Production Planning - Systems requirement, Head count planning, Process mapping, defining the SLAs, Success measures etc. Lack of this process in the business, the organization crumbles when an exceptional event occurs.
2. Procurement of raw materials - Staffing forms an essential part of this process. Understanding the skills required and acquiring the skills through the processes is an art.
3. Training - Building the Talent and Skills required to perform the job. Building the talent with-in and outside. Academia plays an important role in building the talent outside an organization. However should have adequate programs to build the talent and nurture the talent.
4. Service Management - Service Management can as simply as adopted best from ITIL, the Service support and Service design. Incident, problem, change etc etc.. It is also essential that which process you would like to build more rigor for ex. Change Management would be critical in IMS, however problem or release management could play an important role in Software/Hardware product support industry. I am adding here two other sub processes the management books do not talk...is Flow control Management and Interface Management.
5. Quality /Process Management - The key deliverables of this process is to assure and control the quality. In the service industry now you have various standards to adopt, to mention 6 sigma, Lean, TQM, ISO 9000 etc., but it depends which process to adopt based on where you want to focus on the defect reduction. This process responsibility to establish right measures to measure the defects and outputs.
6. Inventory Management- Quite often people forget this process and create a stampede for other processes. This means ensuring the raw materials supplied (People backfills ), Systems procured , Facilities capacity(Power, Seats , Transport etc..) and IT infrastructure (network, Servers, Tools, Applications). This is also a whole game of supply chain management. Retention of the People forms another critical function of this, as Industry is plagued by this virus due to lack of good supply chains.
7. Distribution Channels: This could vary based upon whether you are captive or outsourced or established some channels to take the output or service to customers. As somebody said establishing distribution network is to find a web of culturally fit allies or partners. if the marriage does not work, divorce is inevitable and this could impact entire organization life. Hence, choosing the partner is at most important task.
8. Management control process: Management control and coordination includes a broad range of activities to ensure that organizational goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient fashion. This is where you need managers for managing the processes and people to produce the desired level of output or service.
I have mentioned something about Flow control and Interface (hand-offs) sub processes as part of the Service Management. Flow control is to ensure subsequent outputs are moved faster as input to the preceding process. "Speed" is essential here and delay can cause immense impact to customer service. A LEAN can be used to eliminate the delays and Non Value Add steps in the process.
Second is Interface Management - is control mechanism or process steps to ensure there is fine hand off between two processes without loss of value generated in the previous steps.
"When you try to pull just one thing out of the Universe, you find it attached to everything else." --John Muir Most of the Operations in Service industry measures the success by means of three important outputs 1.Customer Satisfaction 2. Employee Satisfaction 3. Productivity or efficiency of operations
As long as one is ensuring these goals are improving time to time, those organizations reach new heights in terms of service.
