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Operations Management

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Biography

Jonathan Wilson has been a lecturer in Corporate Strategy at Surrey European Management School, University of Surrey, since 1995. He also lectures in Decision Making to MSc Management students and is a visiting lecturer at City University. He has previously lectured at Birmingham University and Cranfield University. His career started in South Africa where he held financial and systems positions in the manufacturing sector. He qualified as a Management Accountant and obtained his MBA from Cape Town University, followed by an MPhil from Cranfield University.

He moved to London in 1986 and worked for Price Waterhouse as a senior consultant. He is currently working on his PhD, which is an investigation into the sources of competitive advantage in the service and manufacturing industries.

Why Use the Web to Study Operations Management?

Operations management is concerned with the effective and efficient transformation of inputs into saleable tangible products and intangible services. The long term survival of most companies is inextricably linked to the ability of management to shape operations resources to achieve this task and to realise that difficult and fundamentally important trade-off decisions must be made. Operations, by the very nature of its underlying resources, cannot be all things to all potential customers. It can do some things very well and others less so. Knowing the existing capabilities allows for current exploitation of resources and also provides the basis for deciding the nature of future resources.

Studying operations management on the Web can be of great value. Understanding where to access the best resources, understanding the nature of rapidly changing operations technologies and methodologies, is very important both to students and to operations practitioners. Visiting operations management Web sites will give a solid introduction to latest technologies to both students and executives of operations management. For example, purchasing the right CAD, CAM or FMS system is a fundamental decision in a manufacturing company. Will the system provide the right market orientated capabilities for the company to compete, both now and into the future? Visiting the sites suggested here will help students to develop answers that are strategically comprehensive and justifiable.

This chapter introduces some general operations management sites and then focuses on some specialised Web sites including computer aided design and manufacturing, flexible manufacturing systems, and manufacturing planning software. Further sections return to more general areas of operations management, including demand forecasting, shop floor control, TQM (Total Quality Management), GSCM (Global Supply Chain Management), project management and queuing theory.

Studying operations management on the Web also has the benefit that the data are always available 24 hours per day at any point in the world with an Internet connection. The data are also being updated so that students are not left with redundant text books as progress is made in the field.

Students are advised to start with the introduction to operations management, as well as looking at some of the introductory Web sites which have been suggested, and move on to look at some specialised Web sites detailing some technical and more general areas of operations management.

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