Fw: 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