Operations and Supply Management

This free online management course in operations and supply management presents you with all you need to optimize your manufacturing or service operations to satisfy your customers? demands. This course provides a mix of ingredients needed to run a successful business. Operations management is a wide field of study but this course breaks it down into digestible steps to help you deliver services and products profitably.

What You Will Learn In This Free Course

Overview of Operations Management

This module introduces you to the concept of operations management, it explains the importance of operations management, historical development and the role of an operations manager. Going further, you will learn the difference between manufacturing and service operations and the various planning processes in both operations. Progressing, you will learn what ‘operations as a system’ means as well as understand how the transformation model works. Finally, we will present the module summary.

Operations Strategy and Product Design

Having learned what operations management is about, the module is designed to help the learner understand the role of strategy in operations management. It begins by outlining the strategies that could be employed in operations management. After that, the learner is exposed to the strategy hierarchy. Moving on, the module explains the concepts of idea generation, product screening, product development process, process selection and finally, computer-aided manufacturing/design.

Supply Chain Management

In this module, you will learn about the principles of Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing and how to eliminate waste. You’ll also learn about the Just-In-Time principles and how these principles can help reduce waste.

Capacity Planning and Facility Layout

In this topic, you will learn how manufacturing and service organizations can plan capacity to match customers’ demands. Also, this topic will help you understand the concept of facility layout in organizations and help you understand the factors that should be taken into consideration when choosing a location for your business.

Work Systems Design

In this module, we will explore how operations managers use strategies like skill variety, task significance, or work organization to enhance job performance. We will also consider models for analyzing work to eliminate unnecessary tasks and regulate the duration of each stage in a production line.

Inventory

In this module, you will learn the important practices of inventory management. You will be exposed to the concept of inventory control which will help you ensure that the right amount of inventory needed for production at a time is available.

Quality Management

In this module, you will learn about the basics and practices of quality management. Since quality is one thing customers watch out for in a product or service, this module will help you understand the important things you need to know about quality management such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Quality Inspections and Standards.

Course assessment