Operations management

The assessment of this module is a written reflective report. It covers 50% of the Operations management course for MSc students. Each Learning team is asked to analysing the management of Operations within an organisation of your choice. At least one student from the learning team is currently working at the choosen company

- The company can be from any part of the world. It could be a not-for-profit organisation provided it has products that are sold to individuals, e.g. a charity selling goods to raise money for the charity's work.

- Please select an operation that has a degree of complexity but not too much. Therefore, a one-person sandwich bar will not have enough operational challenges but Google will have too much! Students may choose to analyse either a service or a manufacturing operation.

OBJECTIVE OF THIS ASSIGNMENT

You will be preparing a report for the board, so this will need to be a professional presented report. For the organisation that you have chosen, you will start with the Operations strategy. You will need to apply the operations strategy framework in order to demonstrate how various operational decisions contribute to operational effectiveness.

Leading organisations pro-actively use their operations in a strategic way to help them gain a competitive advantage. However, many other companies fail to capitalise on their OPS. This assignment is designed to ask you, as a learning team, to look critically at the role operations play in a company (or part of a company) of your choice

Teams are required to analyse the operations within a company of their choosing, apply the concepts learned in the OM module and provide recommendations for improvement to their selected operations.
You need to cover the three elements in your report:
1. How do we compete?
2. What must Operations do well?
3. What (operational) decisions contribute to operations success and what could be done better?

ASSESSMENT

The report will be assessed on the following criteria:

1. Use of models - applicability to the chosen operations/process For example, this might include:
Application of concepts, further reading? Competitive information?
Clarity of business/management research question/s and formulation of clear aims, objectives and scope.
Identify and provide relevant academic and practitioner literature, to draw inferences from the literature

2. Depth of analysis - as opposed to description: For example, this might include:
• Evidence of understanding of links between business strategy, the market and ops strategy
• The scope of data used in the analysis and the quality of the analysis conducted, for example: Tools and Process analysis, Analysis of both number of mentions and importance?
• Reporting and appropriate presentation of the data generated.

3. Extent to which the recommendations and conclusions flow from the prior analysis:
• Recommendations derived: Comprehensive, for example in terms of Strategy/product/ services/customer/improvements /business model?)
• Synthesis: Development of a coherent argument
• Critical analysis of the findings
• Relates the analysis to the academic and practitioner literature
• Findings: generalizable, critical and/or original application of knowledge
• Conclusions/recommendations based on the analysis

4. Quality of report
- Presenting professionally and integrating the sections of the plan so that it makes a coherent and persuasive argument. Well-structured? Clear text? Good appendices? Well-integrated sections?
- Coherent and concise writing? Appropriate and accurate referencing?
- Effective and well-presented figures and tables? Grammar, spelling and appropriate vocabulary?