Introduction to Operations Management

Operations management is about how organizations produce goods and services. Everything you wear, eat, sit on, use, read or knock about on the sports field comes to you courtesy of the operations managers who organized its production. Every book you borrow from the library, every treatment you receive at the hospital, every service you expect in the shops and every lecture you attend at university – all have been produced. While the people who supervised their ‘production’ may not always be called operations managers that is what they really are. And that is what this book is concerned with – the tasks, issues and decisions of those operations managers who have made the services and products on which we all depend.This is an introductory chapter, so we will examine what we mean by ‘operations management’, how operations processes can be found everywhere, how they are all similar yet different,and what it is that operations managers do.