Operations Strategy - Level 1

Operations Strategy – Level 1

Key Information

• Course Code: OPM101A
• Duration: 5 days
• Fee: £2675

Course Outline

Developing Resources and Processes for Strategic Impact

• Why is operations excellence fundamental to strategic impact?
• What is operations strategy and how is it different from operations management?
• What is the ‘content’ of operations strategy?
• The operations strategy matrix
• What is the ‘process’ of operations strategy?

Operations Performance

• Operations performance can make or break any organisation
• Judging operations performance at a societal level
• Judging operations performance at a strategic level
• Judging operations performance at an operational level
• The relative importance of performance objectives changes over time
• Trade-offs – are they inevitable?
• Targeting and operations focus

Substitutes for Strategy

• Fads, fashion and the ‘new’ approaches to operations
• Total quality management (TQM)
• Business process reengineering (BPR)
• Six Sigma
• Some common threads

Capacity Strategy

• The overall level of operations capacity
• The number and size of sites
• Capacity change
• Location of capacity

Purchasing and Supply Strategy

• Do or buy? The vertical integration decision
• Contracting and relationships
• Which type of arrangement?
• Supply network dynamics
• Managing suppliers over time
• Purchasing and supply chain risk

Target audience

• Chief operations officers and chief executive officers
• Operations directors and managers
• Heads of departments
• Senior operations executives, officers, and staff
• Those who wish to gain a comprehensive understanding of the interaction between operational resources and market requirements.
• Those who wish to transform their companies’ prospects through the way they manage their operations resources strategically, turning their operations capabilities into a formidable asset.
• Those who wish to use operations strategy as a major source of competitive advantage in for-profit businesses or the route to achieving social welfare in not-for-profit enterprises.
• Those who appreciate operations strategy as central, ubiquitous and vital to any organization’s sustained success.

Learning outcomes

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to understand:

• The meaning of operations strategy and how all parts of the business can use perspectives on operations strategy to establish a connection between strategy and operational processes and resources.
• How to judge the performance of operations.
• A broad approach to assessing operations performance at a societal level that uses the ‘triple bottom line’ to judge an operation’s social, environmental and economic impact.
• How operations performance can be judged in terms of how it affects an organization’s ability to achieve its overall strategy.
• The more directly operational level aspects of performance – quality, speed, dependability, flexibility, and cost.
• Three related aspects of performance that are fundamental to understanding operations strategy: how the relative importance of different aspects of performance changes over time; how performance objectives trade off against each other (do improvements in some aspects of performance necessarily mean a reduction in the performance of others?); and how exceptional performance levels can be reached by focusing on a limited set of objectives and exploiting the trade-offs between objectives.
• Some ‘new approaches’ to operations and the extent to which they can be seen as ‘strategic’, as well as how they fit into operations strategy.
• The principles behind how operations configure and reconfigure their capacity.
• Purchasing and supply decisions as a critical set of operations strategy decisions.

What is Included:

• 30 hours of classroom-based training
• Apple iPad