The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Operations Management

CHAPTER 2A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO OPERATIONS

The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

—ARISTOTLE

In Chapter 1, we examined an operational process as something that adds value to inputs to create outputs. One of the benefits of looking at organizations in this way is that it helps to identify sources of competitive advantage, as we saw with the value matrix and resource-based view techniques. While potentially useful, such results are only ideas on paper. To determine how we can manage the operation to achieve the desired results, we must extend our view of the transformation process a bit to consider the process as part of an overall system and then apply systems thinking to manage for the results we want to achieve.

After completing this ...