MG 4343 Operations Management: Project Overview and Guidelines

The written project in MG 4343 Operations Management will involve each student in observing and evaluating the overall delivery process of a service system.  In general, this project requires the student to collect, analyze and evaluate information related to the basic delivery process of a business system in order to evaluate its alignment to the intended strategic operational focus and offer recommendations for improved performance.

In other words, this written project helps the student to develop skills in synthesizing operational concepts analyzed in class, and in applying those concepts to a real business environment in order to evaluate existing operational settings and generate suggestions to further improve performance.

Successful completion of this project will contribute to the student’s proficiency in the following learning outcomes:

LO1: Analyze the challenges and opportunities faced by operations managers and evaluate the value and implications of their operational choices in real life organizational contexts. (analysis, evaluation)

The theme for this semester is to ‘analyze and evaluate the overall delivery process of a service system’
                
What you are trying to see is how the actual design, set up and managing of the system’s overall service process is in alignment with the fundamental principles governing operations. Ideally, service processes should be designed and executed in the best possible way under the system’s current operations strategy.

As such they have to be balanced and rightly supported by appropriately developed infrastructure that best exploits the opportunities and deals with the challenges presented. It requires continuous effort and a great insight in order for such an optimization to be achieved and preserved in time in any business system.  Your objective is, therefore, to determine, analyze and evaluate the existing overall service process of the system you have selected in order to identify and bridge the gaps that possibly exist between what the system’s operations intend to deliver and what they actually deliver. 

1. Briefly identify the strategic priorities that govern the system’s operations as defined in its operations strategy. These priorities will provide the ground against which the basic service process will be evaluated since its success depends on the degree to which it is aligned with them. As a result this step should be brief and descriptive. Your intention here is not to analyze the system’s operations strategy but rather to summarize its main directions and focus points. 

Learning Outcomes

2. Construct the current service flowchart (blueprint) for the basic service operation. Critically analyze the operational challenges and their corresponding implications and, then, identify existing or needed defect preventing (poka-yokes) and defect correcting mechanisms.  Think in terms of the task, the customer and the environment.

3. Identify the position of the service process on the service design matrix and draw some working conclusions from it.

4. Comment on the service approach used. Is it the appropriate? Which are its advantages and disadvantages? Do the overall design and infrastructure support the service approach used or not?

5. Based on your preceding analysis, do you think the service delivery system is well organized and optimized?  Summarize your operational conclusions and make recommendations based on the collected information.

An aim of this project is not to simply describe the operations of the selected business system but to critically analyze them. You should, therefore, organize your answers to the above questions in a threefold way:  a) briefly describe the existing reality in the system you are evaluating, b) analyze the dynamics of this reality on the basis of related theoretical principles supported by academic sources, for example, identify and analyze related advantages, disadvantages, challenges and managerial implications of the existing operational reality and, c) draw some practical conclusions and managerial guidelines as a result of your critical evaluation.

    
It is strongly suggested that you select a service system you have easy access to and are a customer of for some time in the past. Having easy access will probably facilitate information gathering both through personal observation and analysis of the system’s working pattern and, possibly, through an interview with the store’s manager as well.

Finally, having experienced the service yourself as a customer will greatly increase your insight into the system from the point of view of both expected and delivered quality as well.  Furthermore, try to pick a service system that is neither too complicated and huge nor too simplified and small.  Both extremes will probably make your work more difficult and will require more time and effort from your side.

Finally, the above is a proposed list of guidelines. Feel free to modify this list, as you think fit, to better adjust it to your specific case.

Each student will prepare the written project using the following required format:

•Title page – includes the title of the project, the student’s name, the course number and name (e.g., MG 2034 Al L5 Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management), the project due date, and the instructor’s name

•Table of Contents – identifies the sections (introduction, main body, conclusion) in the written project and the associated page number for each section

•Introduction – includes a brief statement of what you intend to accomplish in the project, and a summary of what follows in main body

•Main Body – includes the review of the literature and the application of those ideas to the identified business setting

•Conclusion – includes a brief statement of what you have accomplished through your discussion in the main body of the project

•Folder – Place the project in a folder of your choice; it should not be submitted only with the pages stapled or clipped together in the upper left corner