Management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 4

Management - Assignment Example This role is ensured through a number of means including planning, designing, supervising and controlling the process of production (Maloney, 1998). Operations management is highly important in ensuring the achievement of two major goals, which are the effectiveness and efficiency of the business operations. By effectiveness, reference is being made to the fact that it ensures that customer and consumer specifications and expectations are met whiles by efficiency, reference is being made to the need of ensuring that limited available resources are well used to accomplish estimated rate of production. Operations management is needed both in the service and manufacturing sectors but given the fact that the manufacturing sector requires several components of production than the service sector, it would be said that operations management is more needed in the manufacturing industries than in the services sector. After all, in the manufacturing industry, there are more processes to follow , which demand operations management than in the service sector. 2. Discuss the use of PERT/CPM techniques for managing projects. Describe what PERT/CPM does. Discuss advantages and disadvantages of using it. What other techniques might you choose to manage your project? With the advent of technology, there have been a lot more inventions and innovations that have been devised to ensure that project management go on more easily and accessibly. Most of such technologies make use of software that is integrated into existing roles played by project managers. Some of these tasks are statistics and algorithm. With program evaluation and review technique and critical path method, project managers are offered the opportunity to have a digitized versions of statistical and algorithm functioning in project management. More specifically, program evaluation and review technique and critical path method are structured to analyze and symbolize the individual tasks composed in getting the project completed (Maloney, 1998). The advantages associated with these two techniques are that they aid in analyzing the total time needed to finish given tasks. This is so because they analyze all independent tasks involved in the project. Again, they undertake the general scheduling of projects activities. All of these not withstanding; there come disadvantages in the sense that they are hardly scalable for minute projects (Campos and Root, 2006). In the absence of these two, beta distribution and activity diagram could be used to manage projects. 3. What are economies of scale in a manufacturing plant? Do they continue forever? What are diseconomies of scale? How might you decide the optimal size of a plant? In a typical manufacturing plant, the rate of production over time is often fixed. For example, for a given period of time, it is known that on each day, X number of goods will be produced. Due to business growth and decline purposes, there are times that the rates of production wi th changing economic factors. This is where economies of scale and diseconomies of scale come in. basically, economies of scale is said to have been reached or attained when the scale of output increases as the cost per unit declines (Campos and Root, 2006). In such a situation, the resulting short to medium term effect is that revenue and general turnover of the manufacturing plant will increase. Economies of scale often come about because of expansions that lead to several goods and products being produced at lower costs. Economies of scale do not occur forever because of fluctuating growth rate and microeconomic factors. Diseconomies of scale could be said to be the direct opposite of economies of scale