Helping students understand the fundamental concepts and techniques necessary for attaining a world-class performance in service and manufacturing operations is the main learning objective of this course. The course adopts a “process management” viewpoint to address a variety of strategic and operational issues. The course design consists of two inter-linked modules — (1) process analysis, design and improvement: exercises and cases are used here to illustrate the concepts such as capacity, cycle time, bottlenecks and theory of constraints, (2) improving medium- to long-term operational processes: covers topics such as inventory management, supply chain management and operations strategy. The course also introduces students to the way information technology is being used to re-engineer and dramatically improve business processes.
