Operations Management

Operations Management is responsible for operational processes, thus for day-to-day maintenance and management of organization’s processes and resources. Is based on the distribution of work. Operation management exists in all business areas, such as in production, service provisioning, enterprise resource management, procurement or backoffice administration.

Operations management stands at the bottom of the imaginary management pyramid - it forms the basis of running of all companies or organizations. At the top of the pyramid stands strategic management.

Operations management in practice: The objective of the operation is to ensure the day-to-day functioning and smooth running all both main and supporting processes of the company. It is aimed primarily at effectiveness and efficiency of processes, using and procuring of resources, troubleshooting and handling incidents. Therefore it must include appropriate evaluation, measurement and analysis of all company processes.

Operational management covers virtually all processes in the organization - both core processes and support processes that secure of business resources (human resources, finance, technology, information, property, infrastructure). It means for example common HR processes, office processes, marketing (promotion, customer acquisition), procurement, sourcing, inventory management, material flow control, quality assurance, safety, maintenance and repair of property and equipment and many others.

Properly performed operations management helps prevent failures, accidents and other causes of inefficiency. It is focused on solving day-to-day requirements that trigger processes, on coordinating and organizing the work of the people, immediate solving of operational incidents and recovery operations. An important part of traffic management consists of scheduling the work and time management (time management). It is typical of him handling incidents and requirements of our customers (both external and internal).

Traffic management usually includes:

• Requirements Management
• Control, planning and coordinating resource availability and capacity
• Security Management
• Competency Management and organizing of people
• Operational daily decisions
• Control, monitoring and reporting

Operations management is governed by set rules and direction, which are given by company’s strategic management and necessarily needs an operational information about the organization’s resources - their actual status, their capacity, quality, availability and mutual relations. The company needs reliable and unbiased information about own business resources, customer requirements, actual state of processes, finances and material flows.

For operations managers is necessary to have an adequate information. Organizations therefore use different enterprise software for the backoffice administration, management and resource planning (ERP), resource management, customer relationship management (CRM ), supply chain management (SCM), human resource management (HRM) and many other operational and backoffice systems.

Operational management in large organizations is in responsibility mainly middle managers and front-line managers. Top manager responsible for the operation is referred to as COO (Chief Operations Officer). In small and medium-sized organizations is a natural part of the job of top managers or owners.