Leading Business Strategy through Operational Excellence

Leveraging Operations to Achieve Business Goals

A thorough understanding of your organization’s operations processes and capabilities is essential in directing your organization effectively. Knowing whether production capacity and inventory can withstand a shortage of a raw material or an increase in demand resulting from a strategic initiative, is critical for both short and long term planning. Determining whether you can implement a new product innovation within the optimal market introduction window requires you to comprehend the opportunities and constraints of your production processes. If you’re a business leader who needs to align operations with your business objectives, this program will enable you to identify issues within your current processes, learn ways to optimize them with your organization’s strategic priorities in mind, and help you become more confident in making changes to improve performance and profitability.

Discussion Topics

Process Analysis

• Introduction to Process Analysis (I & II)
• Lean, Six Sigma, and Quality
• Queuing Analysis

Management of Supply Chain Components

• Inventory Management (I & II)
• Supply Chain Management
• Working Capital Management

Strategic Alignment

• Operations Alignment
• Expanding Capacity
• Specialization and Growth
• Outsourcing, Dual Sourcing, and Offshoring

Program Objectives

At the conclusion of this program, you will be able to:

• Analyze and manage the processes required to provide goods and services to your customers
• Identify the most effective continuous improvement approaches for your firm’s operational decisions
• Understand the impact of uncertainty on decisions related to resource acquisition and evaluate when extra capacity for specific resources is beneficial
• Evaluate existing processes and alternatives that can make for more efficient and effective inventory decisions
• Select operations options that help your firm manage financial constraints and meet financial objectives in addition to improving operations metrics.
• Understand the causes of the bullwhip effect and strategies to mitigate, or dampen, the effect
• Understand the benefits of alignment in operations and how to achieve and adjust alignment over time
• Determine the best way to align operational scale with your firm’s strategy in order to meet growth goals
• Evaluate and develop an effective sourcing strategy
• Conduct a cost/benefit analysis of changing the scope of operational activities

These three program days are filled with stimulating activities to demonstrate queuing theory, engaging games to illustrate concepts such as constraints and the bullwhip effect, and challenging case studies about capacity expansion, specialization, and strategy alignment. These will be coupled with faculty research presentations and group discussions, all to give you insights into how to align operations and strategic objectives in your organization. You’ll leave with a strong foundation in operations management, e.g., understanding the issues and challenges your operations processes are likely to face, what the key methods for evaluating options to address these challenges are, and how to optimize your operational activities to align most effectively with your firm’s strategy. Ultimately, you’ll have a much broader view of your organization from which to contribute and increase value to your stakeholders.