Operations strategy

What the syllabus asks of you

• Operational decisions: the influence of human, marketing and finance resource availability on operations decisions
• Operational decisions: the changing role of Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in operations management
• Flexibility and innovation: the need for flexibility with regard to volume, delivery time and specification
• Flexibility and innovation: process innovation: changing current processes or adopting new ways of producing products or delivering services
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP): the main features of an ERP programme
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP): how ERP can improve a business’ efficiency in relation to: inventory control, costing and pricing, capacity utilisation, responses to change, workforce flexibility, management information
• Lean production: the aims and purposes of lean production
• Lean production: Kaizen, quality circles, simultaneous engineering, cell production, JIT manufacturing and waste management as operational strategies to achieve lean production
• Lean production: the limitations of operational strategies to achieve lean production
• Lean production: the links between lean production and inventory control, quality, employees roles, capacity management and efficiency
• Operations planning: the need for planning operations
• Operations planning: network diagrams as tools to plan operations
• Operations planning: the main elements of a network diagram: activities, dummy activities, nodes
• Operations planning: network diagrams as means of performing Critical Path Analysis (CPA), including identification of the minimum project duration and the critical path, calculation of total and free float, interpretation of the results of the analysis of a network, how minimum duration and floats might be used in project management
• Operations planning: the benefits and limitations of CPA as a management tool