BSBAALJR'S babblings regarding "operations management"

BSBAALSR personifies B-school alleged-quality combined with B-school quantity. Operations Management is the third of three topics that are most pre-eminent in BSBAALSR's mind, along with "Global Competitive Strategy" and "marketing".

My new original definition of "Operations Management" (OM)

Some of the corporate functions a significant percentage of MBA gurus consider to be "Operations Management" (OM) functions, such as product development and product distribution, seem to be considered to be marketing functions in the eyes of another significant group of MBA gurus, who define marketing as the four P's: Place for distribution, getting the product to the consumer; Product for conception of product, dreaming it up; Pricing for what the product is priced at and Promotion for sales and advertising. For example according to http://www.mapnp.org/library/ops_mgnt/ops_mgnt.htm "Major, overall (operations management) activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution".

Yet generally, MBA gurus do not include product development in the "operations management" purview; they consider the job of "operations management" to be, getting the product produced efficiently at a high quality, not deciding what kind of product is to be produced.

Apparently, generally, MBA gurus consider the efficiency, reliability and safety (avoiding damaged goods) aspects of distribution to be in the "operations management" sphere whereas they consider decisions regarding what will be distributed where to be in the marketing sphere.

Most MBA gurus consider "operations management" to be a kind of central department that interacts with the other departments that relate to "operations management" the way the planets relate to the sun they revolve around; that is, they emphasize, that "operations management" interacts with all other corporate departments.

For example, the marketing department's decisions regarding what shall be sold where effect OM's calculations regarding how products should be moved; marketing's customer feedback analysis effects decisions that effect OM areas of production responsibility; marketing's decisions on pricing effect the amount of money that can be put into production which effects OM decisions; marketing's input re sales-advertising methods effects OM by effecting decisions re what shall be produced through the use of OM methods that transform inputs such as raw materials and personnel into outputs and production.

Whereas product management and service management focus on particular product or service lines, operations management in a more general sense (in the eyes of the more old-fashioned MBA gurus of academe) focuses on all transformational methods whereby raw inputs are transformed into finished goods and services.

What the academic MBA gurus call "operations management", the world in general, being less-old-fashioned, calls "project management". After all, transforming input into output, the process of production, inevitably breaks down into projects.

BSBALLJR on Operations or Project Management

BSBAALJR the incarnation of B-schools in general regardless of alleged-quality-of-school, is less annoying when he discusses project management than he is when he discusses marketing, but the faults he displays in his discussion of marketing, he displays in his discussions of project management. Again he is verbose, hyper-focused on stating the obvious, obsessed with categorizing and labeling re-naming and defining objects and phenomena, pre-occupied with listing objects phenomena and possibilities, and given to insist that if something is true a majority of the time then it is true all the time.

Yet in his discussion of project management BSBAALJR does seem to have stumbled on to something, which is that production processes in general, in production of both goods and services, can be thought of as automobile assembly lines, wherein dysfunction at a given stage in the assembly line can lead to dysfuntions that are less than obvious to a typical high school grad, in other areas of the assembly line.

BSBAALJR boggles my mind the way he enthuses over this "brilliant" "bottleneck" insight, as if it was his own original discovery that nobody else had ever thought of. BSBAALJR takes his ideas from the writings of Toyota auto production line managers who have succeeded in actual real world accomplishments on a grand scale, and then acts as if he has come up with tremendous original patentable ideas of his own. BSBALLJR thinks that everyone who behaves in a manner similar to what he preaches, is a devotee of BSBAALJR who studies the writings of BSBALLJR for several hours a night.

What bothers me, is that BSBAALJR should have wasted so many years before mastering the simple concepts of the Toyota Production Line managers and regurgitating them pretending that he had come up with something new original and brilliant. What BSBAALJR has discovered, is, that, if, for example, you have ten stages one through ten performed one after the other in the order 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, a dysfunction in step 4, could lead to corporate damage greater than what is apparent looking at the situation through the eyes of a moron. For example, if 20 toy cars pass through each stage each day as 20 are produced each day, superficially speaking, looking at things like a moron, a ten percent reduction in production in step 7, should reduce corporate profits productivity etc by one percent, because the step 7 stage fell ten percent and step 7 accounted for ten percent of production. However this simple-mindedness ignores the fact that due to the slowdown at step 7, the workers in steps 8, 9 and 10 spent a certain amount of their time idle, the total number of cars produced in a day declined by ten percent, and problems of having to store the pileup of toy cars in the making at step 7 resulted.

The idea is that problems in certain stages in a production process cause damages to the overall process that are not obvious given a myopic look at a component of a production process, due to the way in which a problem at one stage can effect other stages in the production process, and due to costs of storage of pileups of products in the making, and the costs of movement of products in the making that are piling up.

The idea is that the operations or project manager has to invest the right amount of time energy and money in accounting for such chain reaction phenomena. If he invests $100 and gets $300 in return out of his understanding of such chain reaction phenomena, his rate of return on such investment is three on the dollar but if he invests $250 in it and gets $500 in return, his rate of return is only two on the dollar; therefore the manager might decide that investing more in the streamlining of the production process is not worth it because it leads to a lesser rate of return or on the other hand he might be glad about making more at a lesser rate of return, depending upon the rate of return he projects for various alternative project-management improvements listed on BSBAAL's checkbx laundry list.

It would be best to avoid BSBAALJR in attempting to understand the new operations or project management that is hot in the B-schools these days, and to get the story straight from the horse's mouth, the Toyota Managers themselves, at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0915299143/ref=ase_absolutsearch05/002-6320582-2337641

I really fear that if project managers attempted to actually do every little thing that BSBAAL advises that they do when managing a project, they wouldbecome insane and accomplish less than they would if they were to just rest instead of working doing things so as to be able to check off checkboxes on BSBAAL's project management checklist.

@2005 David Virgil Hobbs