1800 Word Written Report (+/- 10%) – Cover sheet, table of contents, headings, charts, graphs, tables, images and references are excluded from the word count.
Working individually you are tasked with the selection of a business of your choice, such as your current or past employer, and undertake a comprehensive review of their business operations. Specifically, explore, using relevant tools and techniques learnt, the efficiency of operations, resource availability and overall operation strategy, while considering the current market situation and disruptions.
Structure
Organisation overview & analysis of operation management challenges
Supply chain analysis
Risk assessment
Improvement recommendations
Business & academic references
1. Organisation’s overview and operations management challenges
Provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the organisation, and define the scope of your analysis. Whether it is the organisation’s entire operations, a particular region, local market or a specific business unit.
Conduct a critical analysis of business challenges using established operations management frameworks.
Your response should include key and relevant company data – suitably presented and tailored to the scope of analysis. In addition, your work should include a thorough examination of the most pressing operation management challenges the organisation is now facing, which may impede the achievement of the planned strategic goals. Challenges must be clearly identified. You should use established operation management frameworks to structure your answer, such as: the 4Vs (Volume, Variety, Variation, Visibility); OM Performance Objectives (Q, C, S D, F); the 7 Wastes of Lean Management (over processing, over production, inventory, defects, motion, transport, waiting time); and/or any other frameworks you consider relevant. An excellent response will go beyond qualitative descriptions and provide a thorough critical analysis. This needs to be supported with specific KPIs and other quantitative data, which shows actual organisational performance against planned targets. You should use suitable data visualisation tools and methods, such as: tables, charts, diagrams, and/or graphs, amongst others.
2. Supply chain analysis
Using a specific flagship product or service provided by your organisation, conduct a critical analysis into the organisation’s supply network, where you identify key players – and their respective roles – across the company’s procurement chain.
You should create a supply chain diagram and assess the current level of vertical integration by analysing which stage(s) across the supply network does the company control. Conclude your analysis with concise supply network improvement recommendations, based on best-practice competitive benchmarking, as well as leveraging technological developments and innovations.
3. Risk Analysis
Create an operations management risk register, identifying key risks.
The register will use an appropriate template and be formatted so that risks are suitably ranked and rated.
4. Improvement recommendations
Based on the analysis conducted so far, provide a set of clearly enumerated, concrete and viable business operations management recommendations for continuous quality improvement.
Your answer answer should consolidate all your research findings and analysis into a set of clearly articulated, concise, realistic and feasible recommendations, which will enhance the organisation’s strategic capabilities in an operations quality context. You should enumerate your suggestions, in order to prioritise them.
You are encouraged to use continuous quality improvement frameworks to structure your answer – such as the PDSA cycle, or other relevant ones – and you should offer managerial guidance in terms of duties, responsibilities, implementation timings and key performance indicators to be used, as well as their measurement and control methods.
5. Business and Academic References
Your work should be supported by a comprehensive set of relevant and recent qualitative descriptions and quantitative data, backed by citations and –where possible – business and academic references from a variety of sources, industry publications, academic journals, textbooks and reliable media articles.
You are strongly encouraged to make adequate usage of headings, sub headings, figures, charts, images, diagrams, graphs and other professional data visualisation tools to optimise your report’s contents and word count. Cover sheet, table of contents, headings, charts, graphs, tables, images and references are excluded from the word count.
All references should be presented in accordance to APA v7 referencing standards.
