Operations Management & Supply Chains

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT & SUPPLY CHAINS

Weekly Questions – Week Nine

Define the term operations management

Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services. It is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.


Click this link to find out how the development and the future put pressure on Operations Management

Explain operations management’s role in business

OM ranges across the organisation and includes many interrelated activities, such as:

-       Forecasting; E.g. estimating seat demands for flights, weather, landing conditions and estimates for growth or reduction in air travel.

-       Capacity; this is the key essential metric for the airline to maintain cash flow and increase revenues. Underestimating or overestimating flights will hurt profits.

-       Scheduling; the airline operates on tight schedules that must be maintained including flights, attendants, ground crews, baggage handlers and routine maintenance.

-       Managing Inventory; inventory of such items as goods, beverages, first-aid equipment, in-flight magazines, pillows, blankets, and life jackets is essential for the airline.

-       Assuring Quality; Quality is indispensable in an airline where safety is the highest priority. There is also an emphasis on efficiency, courtesy and high quality customer service during ticketing, check in and in flight service.

-       Motivating and Training Employees; Airline employees must be highly trained and continually motivated, especially when dealing with frustrated airline travellers.

-       Locating Facilities; Key questions facing airlines include which cities to offer services, where to host maintenance facilities, and where to locate major and minor hubs.

A diagram of Operations Management

Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Managers can use IT to heavily influence OM decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality, and customer satisfaction. It makes operational decisions because OM exerts considerable influence over the decisions involve many possible alternatives that can have varying impacts, therefore OM information systems are critical for managers to be able to make well informed decisions which then evolve strategic business systems.

Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

A supply chain consists of all parties involved, directly or indirectly, in the procurement of a product pr raw material. Supply Chain Management (SCM) involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. There are five key components for a supply chain management – plan, source, make, deliver and return.

This video further explains the role that supply chains play in a successful organisation.

List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

The five basic supply chain management components:

1.     Plan; the strategic portion of SCM. Companies must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products and services. This also involves developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less, and delivers high quality value to customers.

2.     Source; reliable suppliers who will deliver the goods and services required for making products must be chosen. A set of pricing, delivery and payment processes with suppliers must be developed, and metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships should be created.

3.     Make; this is where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

4.     Deliver; commonly referred to as logistics, which is the set of processes that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage supplies from suppliers to customers. During this step companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfil the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

5.     Return; this is the most problematic step. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

This is a simple diagram of the Supply Chain Fundamentals.

Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.

Information technology’s primary role in SCM is creating the integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within a firm – such as marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing and distribution – and between firms, which allow the smooth, synchronised flow of both information and product between customers, suppliers and transportation providers across the supply chain. IT integrates planning, decision making processes, business operating processes and information sharing for business performance management.  

Enterprise Architectures

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES

Weekly Questions – Week Six

This video is a short explanation of Enterprise Architectures.

What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

In formation architecture identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured, whereas information infrastructure includes the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation’s goals. They are both key components of an enterprise architecture, but their primary aspects differ.

 Three key areas of information architecture are backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and information security.

Five chief characteristics of a solid information infrastructure are flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability and performance.

A diagram of an Information Architecture.

Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.

An organisation can successfully implement a solid information architecture by creating and sustaining the three chief components of the architecture. The CIO (Chief Information Officers) must be able to instigate very strong back up, disaster recovery and security of the organisation’s information in order to save time and money, which is evidently lost due to system failures and crashes. An organisation should choose and enforce a back-up and recovery system that is in line with it’s business goals, as those with large volumes of information will require more frequent backups to storage servers in comparison to organisations with a smaller volume of information. An organisation must also consider the cost of losing information within each department, as well as across the whole enterprise, which will help the company to create a sufficient disaster recovery plan in a time where the organisation faces power outages, floods, and harmful hacking. Finally, security is a top priority for business managers, as they prevent hackers, spammers, and malcontents from entering their networks.

List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

As mentioned earlier, the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture are:

· Flexibiltiy – systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes, and this is achieved by the organisation’s awareness of today’s business as well as tomorrow’s.

· Scalability – this refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands including more customers and product lines and expansion into new markets.

· Reliability – this ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Unreliable information puts the company at risk when making decisions based on the information.

· Availability – this addresses when users can access systems. High availability refers a system component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. Systems must also come down for maintenance, upgrades and fixes, and scheduling system downtime for this is difficult when the system is expected to operate continually.

· Performance –how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction, and not having enough performance capacity can have a devastating and negative impact on a business.

Describe the business value in deploying a service-orientated architecture.

A service-orientated architecture is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. This helps businesses by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing ones, which evidently enables businesses to address the news business requirements, provides the option to make the services consumable across different channels, and and exposes the existing enterprise and legacy applications as services. The key technical concepts of SOA are:

· Services – a business task.

· Interoperability – the capability of two or more computer systems to share data and resources, even though different manufacturers make them.

· Loose coupling – the capability of services to be joined together on demand to create composite services, or disassembled just as easily into their functional components.

This link is a further explanation of a service-oriented architecture...


What is an event?

Events are the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology – they detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. It involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter – a low stock alert in the warehouse or an especially large charge on a customers credit card – and automatically alert the people best equipped o handle the issue.

What is a service?

Services are more like software products than they are coding projects, appealing to a broad audience and are reusable in order to have an impact on productivity. These services describe a valuable business process and include “Print”, “Save”, “Credit Check”, “Customer Information” and “Process Payment”.

When referring to Service Orientated Architecture, a service is simply a business task such as checking a potential customer’s credit rating when opening a new account. They are what a company does on a day-to-day basis, which are repeatable business tasks or components.

Databases & Datawarehouses

DATABASES & DATAWAREHOUSES

Weekly Questions – Week Seven

A visual representation of a database.

List, describe and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

• Accuracy – all of the values must be correct. For example, a name must be spelt correctly; a dollar amount must be recorded properly.

• Completeness – none of the values should be missing. For example, an address should be complete with a street, city, state and postcode.

• Consistency – arregate or summary information must be in agreement with detailed information. For example, the total fields should be equal to the true total of the individual fields.

• Uniqueness – each transaction, entity and event should appear only once in the information. For example, there should not be any duplicate customers.

• Timeliness – the information should be current to the business requirements. For example, the information should be updated weekly, daily, or hourly.

Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.

Data is raw fats that describe the characteristics of an event, as are the general raw facts used to make up sources of information, or a database. A database maintains information about various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people (employees), and places (warehouses). A database management system (DBMS) is used to access information from a database, usually software through which users and application programs interact with the database. The user sends requests to the DBMS and it performs the actual manipulation of the information within the database.

Click here for a further detailed explanation...

Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.

- Organisations can accurately store records

- They can distribute information easily

- Implementing databases will reduce redundancy of information

- They will help business processes to be more efficient

- Information integrity – the information stored will be of high quality

- They make sure the information/data is secure by providing authorisation to different groups/departments for the different information that they need.

Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.

A relational database model is a type of database that stores information in the form of logically related two-dimensional tables each consisting of rows and columns. The primary concepts of the relational database model are:

• Entities, which is a person, place, thing, transaction or event about which information is stored.

• Entity classes

• Attributes, which are also called fields or columns, are characteristics of properties of an entity or class e.g. the attributes for CUSTOMER may include customer ID, customer name, customer phone etc. 

• Keys, where various entity classes are managed and organised once developers identify them as either primary keys (a field that uniquely identifies a given entity in the table which provide a way of distinguishing each entity in a table) or foreign keys (a primary key of one table that appears to be an attribute in another, providing a logical relationship between the two tables.

• Relationships.

Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.

A data-driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database. They are especially useful when the site offers a great deal of information, products or services as they invite visitors to select and view what they are interested in by inserting a query which is satisfied by a custom built web page, rather than the visitor being inundated or avalanched with information. Websites that contain continually changing information such as press releases, new product information, pricing etc are most suited to having a data-driven website. Some more benefits and advantages of data driven websites include:

• Development, as it allows the website owner to make changes any time, all without having to rely on a developer or knowing HTML programming because a well-structured, data driven website enables updating with little or no training. 

• Content management, as a static website requires a programmer to make updates adding an unnecessary layer between the business and its web content, which can lead to misunderstandings and slow turnarounds for desired changes.

• Future expandability, as the site is enabled to grow faster then a static site. Changing the layout, displays, and functionality of the site is easier with a data-driven solution.

• Minimising human error, as well-designed data-driven websites will have ‘error trapping’ mechanisms to ensure that required information is filled out correctly and that content is entered and displayed in its correct format, whereas some highly competent programmers that maintain pages will over look things and therefore make mistakes. 

• Cutting production and update costs, as the site can be updated and published by any competent data entry or administrative person, and as well as being convenient and affordable, updating these sites takes a fraction of the time in comparison to static sites.

• More efficient, as the system keeps track of the templates so that users to not have to. Its infrastructure will improve the reliability and stability of a website while greatly reducing the chance of ‘breaking’ a part of the site when adding new areas.

• Improved stability, as the data is never lost compared to that of a static site, where programmers have to keep track of all the source files, and their departure could involve recreating existing work if those source files cannot be found.

Click here to see great examples of data-driven websites...

Networks, Telecommunications & Mobile Technology

Networks, Telecommunications & Mobile Technology

Weekly Questions - Week Eight

1. Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.

Wireless fidelity (wi-fi) is a means of linking computers linking infrared radio signals. Wi-fi technology is gaining acceptance as a home or neighbourhood network allowing an assortment of mobile devices including laptop and desktop computers to connect and share a single broadband access point to the Internet. These wireless networks are becoming established in many businesses as a lack of space or mobility for LAN connections is wiped out, and the wi-fi connection is available anywhere within the business. They are also being employed as overlay networks, so that employees are able to move their laptops from office to office as well as being able to connect in areas with no LAN outputs. 

2. Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

Many consumers today are making phone calls over the Internet by using voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) as this offers a similar quality to landline and mobile calls. The telecommunications industry is experiencing great benefits from combining VoIP with emerging standards that allow for easier development, interoperability, among systems and application integration. Since VoIP uses existing Internet infrastructure to route telephone calls more efficiently and inexpensively than traditional telephone service, VoIP offers businesses significant cost savings productivity gains, and service enhancements.

Additional features available using VoIP solutions include:

· Business application integration

· Calendar integration

· Call waiting

· Caller ID

· Click-of-a-mouse simplicity

· Conference call capabilities with on-screen document sharing

· Comprehensive information about each caller

· Desktop application integration

· Dial-by-name capability

· Easy navigation

· Four or five digit dialling to anyone, regardless of location

· Mobility – users can work from anywhere

· Three-way calling

3. Compare LANs and WANs

A local area connection (LAN) is designed to connect a group of computers in close proximity to each other such as in an office building, school or a home, often connecting to other LANs or to the Internet. They are useful for sharing resources like files, printers, games or other applications.

A wide area network (WAN) spans a large geographic area, such as a state, province or country, often connecting multiple smaller networks, such as LANs. 

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4. Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies use active or passive tags in the form of chips or smart labels that can store unique identifiers and relay this information to electronic readers. RFID tags combine tiny chips with an antenna, and once a tag is placed on an item it automatically radios its location to RFID readers on shop shelves, checkout counters, loading bay doors, and shopping carts, resulting in inventory being taken automatically and consistently.

Organisations are leveraging RFID to improve productivity of their workforce while simplifying the implementation and ongoing management costs of their networks.  RFID technologies offer practical benefits to almost anyone who needs o keep track of physical assets. Manufacturers improve supply chain planning and execution by incorporating RFID tech. Retailers use RFID to control theft, increase efficiency in their supply chains and improve demand planning. Pharmaceutical manufacturers use RFID systems to combat the counterfeit drug trade and reduce errors in filing prescriptions. Machine shops track their tools with RFID to avoid misplacing tools and to track which tools touched a piece of work.

5. Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology

The latest trends in mobile phones reflect a convergence of voice, video and data communication.

 It enables easy access to the Web, access to ‘live’ information, no involvement of cables and/or wiring, and reduces the requirements for bugs/switches. Deploying mobile computing also allows wireless connection between a mobile device and other computing environments, such as Internet and intranet. Mobile carriers can initiate real-time contact with other systems from wherever they happen to be and can also be reached instantly when they carry and open mobile device.

It’s value-adding components include:

- Ubiquity – anywhere / anytime – technology cheap

- Convenience – Access quickly without a PC

- Instant Connectivity – No boot up, nothing technical

- Customisation – personalised information depending on location / tasted / preferences

Security is a threat and disadvantage of mobile technology that continues to be a priority in the development of the Bluetooth specification, as personal information can be accessed through mobile devices easily if they are connected via Bluetooth.