Units concerning both manufacturing as well as the assembling of the products are on a very large scale affected by the decisions involving the location of the plant. Location of the plant itself becomes a very important factor concerning service facilities, as the plant location decisions are strategic and long-term in nature.

Plant location decisions need detailed analysis because:
1. Wrong plant location generally affects cost parameters i.e. poor location can act as a continuous stimulus of higher cost. Marketing, transportation, quality, customer satisfaction are some of the other factors which are greatly influenced by the plant location decisions – hence these decisions require in-depth analysis.

2. Once a plant is set up at a location which is not much suitable, it is a very disturbing as well as very expensive process to shift works of a company to some other place, as it would largely affect the cycle of production.
Continue Reading »

Production can be defined as the conversion process of the input to the output, resulting in the production of the goods and the services.

Basically, a manufacturing system mainly involves three parts or steps – inputs, transformation process and output. The operations and activities used together lead to the production of goods and services, and this whole process is referred to as the manufacturing system or method. A manufacturing method can be considered as the combination of the sub systems which are independent in nature and each subsystem is responsible for performing a particular function. Manufacturers must be able to interact not only with the external environment but also with the internal environment.

Factors affecting the choice of manufacturing method can be summarized as follows: –
1. Effect of volume and variety – These factors greatly influence the choice of the manufacturing method as high product variety will have to be accompanied with very good workers having developed skills and general purpose machines; on the other hand low product variety leads to the usage of workers who are not that much skilled, accompanied with very simple systems of production planning and control.
Continue Reading »

The desired qualities in a good production manager can be summarized as follows.

1) Intelligence – Intelligence forms a very important and essential quality for a production manager or for any manager. The goals and objectives of the organization should be very much clear in the mind of the manager, in order to completely make efficient use of the resources.

2) Flexibility – In an organization, situations keep on changing from time to time and very rarely remain static. The situations may include changing priorities or demands of the customers etc. A good production manager should possess flexibility which will enable him to modify the planning procedure to suit the changing conditions.
Continue Reading »

The production manager forms a very important and defining part of the organization structure of an engineering company. The responsibilities of a production manager can be summarized as follows.

1) Forecasting the requirements of the production in order to achieve the production target.

2) Making most efficient utilization of the available sources for production.
Continue Reading »

The present position where the operations management finds itself today has gone through a large number of stages to reach the present formidable stage. Although the history of operations management is not very old—the roots of this type of management can be easily linked with the concept which deals with the phenomenon of division of labor. This concept was given by Adam Smith in his very famous book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ in 1776.

Experts in the field, from the time of Adam Smith and F.W. Taylor, leading to Dodge and Tippet, have contributed to the important present status of operations management in today’s world.

The various contributors who have played a very important role in the formation and also the development of operations management are as under:
Continue Reading »