Operations Management Analysis and Evaluation of an Organization for Competitive Advantage

Operations Analysis

Assignment task

You must prepare and submit an original business report addressing the tasks identified later in this section, but summarised below.

Your report must analyse and evaluate the operations management of an organisation, or of a specific business unit/division, and draw conclusions over the extent to which its operational capability supports its corporate strategy and provides competitive advantage.

The Organisation

You must select one focal organisation as the subject of your assignment. Where the organisation has different divisions or a disparate product/service offer, you may have to select one specific area of the organisation for study (i.e. you will need to define the scope to be covered in your report). You may also find it appropriate to select by geographical region, or if the organisation has disparate operations, one of these.

The organisation selected should meet the following criteria:

It should be a well-known business – you will find more data/information on large well-known businesses;

It must have a website that is available in English and produce annual reports in English;

It is recommended that your selected company be publicly listed/publicly traded on the stock market – you will find more data/information available on such organisations.

The Content of the Assignment

You are required to demonstrate your learning from the course material by analysing and evaluating the operations management of your chosen organisation (or business unit/division) in a report containing the following sections.

1.A brief introduction to the organisation, including an overview of the environment in which it operates and the pressures that its sector faces. This will give the reader sufficient context to make sense of the report.

2.An analysis of the operations of the selected organisation – you must apply the transformation process model and the 4Vs model (and consider the implications) to your selected organization and their operations. In addition to this you should select two further topics/concepts covered in the module or from your wider reading (relating to operations management) this might be (as appropriate to the organisation) – performance objectives and current performance, the types of operating process, the service concept (what the operations systems are designed to deliver), location and layout, capacity management, the scheduling and control of resources, supply chain management, quality assurance or the application of TQM principles, the application of ‘lean’ principles.

This section is likely to represent the largest part of the Report and it is for you to decide which concepts/theories/models you include in this section.

3.The identification of the major strengths and weaknesses of the operation – achieved performance against required performance. From your analysis, you should also consider the extent to which the operations functions support the broader business strategy of the organisation, and the extent to which the organisation’s operations capability is used to create competitive advantage

NOTES

Since each organisation is different, we cannot tell you the relative weight that you should put on each of the elements or the specific operations management concepts and models that you should use.

Please remember that this is an Operations Management assignment – although it may be necessary to relate your analysis to marketing or other business functions, your focus should remain on how business operations are used to create competitive advantage (or not).

You should make appropriate reference to the theoretical concepts and techniques covered in the Module to support your evaluation. Try to maintain a balance between theory and practice. You must use at least 10 sources other than the set texts. You must include a reference list of sources used. Charts, diagrams and other supporting material might well be given as appendices to the report. These should be properly referenced in the text.

The assignment must be structured and presented as a formal business report.

Do not make excessive use of abbreviations or acronyms. Although they may be understood within an organisation, they are not acceptable when work is prepared for general wider readership.

§Reports must be presented in the formats specified in the Programme Regulations.