Finance is the function responsible for managing cash flow, current assets, and capital investments. Marketing is responsible for sales, generating customer demand, and understanding customer wants andneeds. Most of us have some idea of what finance and marketing are about, but whatdoes operations management do?Operations management (OM) is the business function that plans, organizes,coordinates, and controls the resources needed to produce a company’s goods and services. Operations management is a management function. It involves managing people, equipment, technology, information, and many other resources. Operationsmanagement is the central core function of every company. This is true whether thecompany is large or small, provides a physical good or a service, is for profit or not-for-profit. Every company has an operations management function. Actually, allthe other organizational functions are there primarily to support the operations function. Without operations, there would be no goods or services to sell. Consider a retailer such as The Gap, which sells casual apparel. The marketing function providespromotions for the merchandise, and the finance function provides the needed capital. It is the operations function, however, that plans and coordinates all the resourcesneeded to design, produce, and deliver the merchandise to the various retail locations.Without operations, there would be no goods or services to sell to customers.The role of operations management is to transform a company’s inputs into thefinished goods or services. Inputs include human resources (such as workers andmanagers), facilities and processes (such as buildings and equipment), as well as materials, technology, and information. Outputs are the goods and services a companyproduces. Figure 1-2 shows this transformation process. At a factory the transformationis the physical change of raw materials into products, such as transforming leather andrubber into sneakers, denim into jeans, or plastic into toys. At an airline it is the efficient movement of passengers and their luggage from one location to another. At ahospital it is organizing resources such as doctors, medical procedures, and medications to transform sick people into healthy ones.
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