Who Should Attend?
- Executives, and strategic leaders across an organization who need to connect operational decisions with the overall company strategy and to the bottom line, whether or not they are directly involved with operations.
- Professionals whose job scope is expanding to include operations decisions, and those who must assess the impact of operations on strategic initiatives. In some organizations, it will be beneficial to send leaders across multiple departments: sales, marketing, finance, accounting, procurement, plus other groups engaging with operations outcomes.
- Operations professionals whose increased responsibilities include providing input to their firm’s strategy.
- Managers in both operations and non-operations roles who want to advance their careers by leveling up their skills:
o Sales and account managers
o Strategy/business development executives
o R & D, innovation, and new product development leaders
o Senior marketing managers
o Senior finance and accounting managers
o Procurement, sourcing, or purchasing leaders
o Demand and inventory managers
o Cost manufacturing engineers
More About This Program
Are you ready to gain substantial insights into how to align operations processes with your organization's business strategies? Enhance your contributions to your organization and increase value for your stakeholders by understanding the opportunities and challenges in operations management. This "live virtual" program is filled with stimulating activities, engaging games to illustrate concepts, and challenging case studies. These will be coupled with faculty research presentations and group discussions, demonstrating queueing theory and constraints, and covering capacity expansion, specialization, and strategy alignment. You’ll leave with a strong foundation in operations management, understanding issues 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.
This live-streaming virtual course consists of:
- Six 2-hour live-streamed class sessions (held twice a week over a three-week period)
- Two informative and fun simulation games--one about inventory management in a supply chain, and the other about sourcing options and choices
- Pre-session readings and questions to address to familiarize yourself with the session topic(s)
- Robust live, online class discussions with your instructor and other participants, who come from across the health care industry
Classes will be held using Zoom video-conferencing, which creates a virtual classroom where you can see the professor and presentation screen, as well as seeing the other participants. Similarly, the professor can see all of the students who engage online during the group session. You’ll be able to communicate with both the professor and your peers through this platform.
To participate in this course you will need to have a working webcam, built in or attached, and have downloaded the Zoom Cloud Meeting app onto your laptop.
If you have any questions about this requirement, call Duke Executive Education team at +1.919.660.8011 or Toll Free +1.800.372.3932, or email us at execed-info@duke.edu.
This course will address specific issues pertaining to both manufacturing and service settings across a wide variety of industries, and will cover quantitative tools--models and data-driven methods--and qualitative frameworks. The following topics will be addressed:
- Process Fundamentals
- Business Process Improvement
- Inventory Management and Information Flows
- Supply Chain Management
- Operations strategy and Strategic Alignment
- Global Sourcing Strategy
In your initial session, you'll consider the design of a process that generates a good or service that's capable of meeting demand. A process is a series of steps involved in manufacturing a product or delivering a service, and each step in a process is capable of making a certain amount of output. A well-designed process is carefully constructed such that each step is capable of meeting market demand, and the combination of all steps produces output at a rate that satisfies the organization’s needs. This is not always easy to accomplish, as processes and individual steps come in many different forms: for instance, some steps are very fast, while others are very slow and labor intensive; some steps process many units at one time (“batch” steps) while others process only one unit at a time.
Sessions 1--2
In your first two sessions, you will assess the relationship between a firm’s strategy and the underlining processes, and explore how to design new processes and improve existing ones. Your class will focus initially on ensuring a process is capable of satisfying the average demand that it faces, and in a teaching note (“Process Analysis”) you'll discover the fundamental tools and methodologies that allow us to analyze a system and eliminate long-term supply-demand mismatches. Even though a process can, on average, satisfy demand, problems may still occur. In particular, uncertainty (randomness) can generate short-term mismatches between supply and demand, resulting in backlogs of work (or queues). These short-term mismatches often arise in service industries that are naturally subjected to more variability than manufacturing industries. You will explore the root causes of uncertainties using the tools and strategies you'll find in a teaching note (“Queueing Analysis”) that enable you to understand and manage the short-term mismatches. To that end, we will see how careful analysis can be a powerful means to redesign and improve business processes in both service and manufacturing industries.
Sessions 3--4
The next two sessions also concern uncertainties. Unlike with services, physical goods are typically created in advance of demand and “inventoried” to await the arrival of a customer. The resulting inventory is a tangible resource that can be used to cope with demand uncertainty, unlike unused capacity in a service system that cannot be stored for future use. As a result, managing inventory of physical goods is a crucial part of matching supply and demand in manufacturing and retail industries. In this part of the program, you'll discuss ways to manage such inventories and use them to the organization’s benefit by balancing the competing objectives of satisfying customer demand while minimizing inventory costs and investment. An interactive simulation allows you to experiment with using data to manage inventory for firms and to examine the impact of individual decisions on the entire supply chain. We will also connect our discussion of inventory management with the logistics of the supply chain and explore the role of distribution centers in an organization’s ability to match supply and demand.
Sessions 5--6
In the final two sessions, we will demonstrate the importance of designing an effective operations strategy that aligns with the overall strategic goals of the organization and introduce a framework to evaluate a firm’s operations strategy within three categories of decisions: scale, source, and scope. Scale refers to the volume of activities performed. Source refers to whether an operation’s activities are insourced or outsourced, and whether they are performed onshore, nearshore, or offshore. Scope refers to the variety of activities performed, e.g., whether the organization focuses on a small set of activities (specialization) or a broad set of activities (diversification). Using a case study and a simulation, you'll determine the power of operational alignment along each of these dimensions—and the pitfalls of operational misalignment. An integrative discussion of the program material and the critical nature of effective operations management, both at a tactical (day to day) and strategic (long term) level, will conclude the program.
