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Operations (BUSA90227)

Graduate courseworkPoints: 12.5On Campus (Parkville)

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Overview

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In fiercely competitive global and dynamic environments, companies face increasing pressures to exceed customer expectations along multiple performance measures, such as cost, quality, flexibility and innovativeness. To outperform their competitors, many firms make the mistake of mimicking their rivals, rather than focusing on developing the organizational capabilities that competitors will find difficult to match over the long term. And although operations are at the core of a firm’s value adding activities, few firms have sought to build a sustainable competitive advantage around these capabilities.

Operations deals with the design, management and continuous improvement of business processes. It aims at providing some of the core concepts in operations that are essential for leveraging a firm’s operational capabilities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This course provides a logical and rigorous approach to plan and control process structure and managerial levers to achieve desired business process performance.

Intended learning outcomes

On completion of this subject, students should be able to:



  • Analyse real-world processes and evaluate the fit and consistency they offer with respect to the firm's overall strategy and positioning in the marketplace
  • Perform detailed process analysis to identify existing bottlenecks and improve processes through de-bottlenecking approaches
  • Understand the role that inventory plays in real-world situations, identify relevant managerial levers for controlling the level of inventory, and apply simple analytical frameworks for estimating the optimal order size and the level of safety stock that a firm should carry for its chosen level of service
  • Identify the drivers of variability in processes and propose managerially relevant solutions to contain the effects of variability using queuing models
  • Use robust statistical process control techniques to ensure that a given process under consideration is both capable and in control to deliver the products and services that satisfy customer needs
  • Apply six-sigma and lean (Toyota Production System) principles to improve the performance of processes

Last updated: 25 September 2024