Operations Management Group Project- OM in Action
The objective of this group project is to integrate knowledge that we have learned in class with personal experience by taking a close look into the operations of an organization someone on your team have some personal contact with, such as a local restaurant, grocery, college, gym, bar, transportation service, and numerous other local businesses.
First, your team of two (maximum allowable group size is 3) should identify a problem worth working on... use your own experience, whether as an employee, business owner, customer, or other role. If you don't know what to work on, maybe walk around a little and observe local businesses and decide on a worthy operations problem that needs your attention. Your goal as an operations and business consulting team is to:
1. Focus - Identify one particular problem within the organization - a single operation that could be improved through the use of some of the operations management concepts studied in this course.
2. Analyze - Investigate the current operation. What are the causes of the problem? What is the impact? How could the problem be corrected or improved? Specifically address what measurements can be taken to quantitatively analyze the operation, such as customer wait time.
3. Design - Explain how the operation could be improved by applying OM knowledge. Sketch a design for a better system.
Section 1: (1 paragraph) Introduction: provide a detailed description of the organization, what they do, who are there customer
Section 2: (1 paragraph) Problem: Describe the operations management problem that you will address by using methods / tools discussed in this course. Write a concise problem statement like this; Problem Statement: The problem is ...The impact is ...The desired state is ...
Section 3: (3 paragraphs) - Analysis. Discuss how you will apply an OM method to study the problem. Please be specific, for example if you talk about statistical process control (SPC), describe what are you going to measure (variable or attribute) and how? The methods we have investigated are value chain, location planning, forecasting, TQM tools, SPC, location, and breakeven analysis. MS Excel Spreadsheet (e.g., Mock-up)
Section 5: (1 Figure) - Illustration. Create a figure of the system and illustrate problem areas...a basic sketch, flowchart, cause/effect diagram, and other illustration of the business operation you are going to improve...provide information on your design in the figure.
Section 6: (2 paragraphs) - Design. Briefly discuss a proposed solution to the problem. Essentially all that is needed here is a few succinct statements that are your consulting groups recommendations to the businesses, organizations, or individuals who own the problem.
Section 7: (1 paragraph) Summary. Draw some conclusions, how would this help the organization, cost and benefits of implementation.