Operation Management - report

I know that several of you are concerned about the format and length of this paper since they are not defined. Here are some tips that I have learned about Operations Management that might help.

Two ways that business professionals display information is in a Decision Paper or Information Paper. These are both very similar with the only difference being that the information paper is designed to inform a decision maker and a decision paper is providing the information necessary to make a decision. At this point in your short Operations Manager career I would recommend an Information Paper approach. This way you can specifically inform your boss (the CEO) what you have done to the factory and what the results were.

Here is a typical Information Paper format.

Title Page: With your name, the title of your paper (use something real, not MGT 307), and a date

Body:

Start with an introductory paragraph that informs the boss of what you are trying to tell them.

Bottom Line paragraph that says where you are and what is next. This should be short.

Assumptions paragraph that states any assumptions that you made or will have to make in the future.

Facts and Analysis paragraphs are the meat and potatoes. What did you do? What did you expect to happen? What really did happen? Support these facts with graphics. The graphics can be visual displays of data or tables of data. You choose how best to sell your results. You can do this either as a week by week discussion or by a topic (forecasting, scheduling, etc.).

Summary and conclusion: This set of paragraphs brings all of the highlights to a close.

References – if you need them. I don’t require them unless you specifically call out something that the boss may need to take a deeper look at.

Hopefully this format now allows you to tell your story about the three things that you are being graded on:

1. How did your team’s factory improve over time? Use real metrics to show that your team became more effective and more efficient. 15 points

2. What did your team do and how did it affect your team’s results? Use real metrics to show what happened. 50 points

3. What would you do differently and why? Use information from the book/slides/videos/class to support your comments. 35 points

Good luck!

Factory Process Improvement Update

The First Two Months

Jerry Burch

April 2, 2018

Purpose:

This paper provides information about what we have done over the first two months to improve the factory effectiveness and efficiency. We have several things that have worked well and others that we are still working on.

Bottom Line:

In the first two months we have increased X by Y. We expect this to continue since we still have several projects that are just now beginning to take effect. In particular we anticipate … which will …

Assumptions:

We assumed that continuous improvement processes will be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness without hiring any more employees and without making any financial improvement to the factory.

Facts and Analysis:

(Here is where you really get to shine. A great way to display this information is to start a paragraph telling what you were trying to accomplish. Then put a graph just below that shows what happened. Then put a paragraph explaining the data. Repeat the process until you are done.)

Our first concern was to reduce the forecasting error around Models A and B. To address this we chose to use a _______ forecasting technique based on the apparent ______ that we saw. Figure 1 shows the Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) over time.

Figure 1 – Mean Absolute Percent Error over 7 week period

As you can see from Figure 1 we were able to reduce the MAPE from around 30% to 15% over the 7 week period. We did this by implementing _____ during week 4 which really helped and then the second largest gain came in week ____ when we _____. We think that we may be able to reduce the MAPE another ____% by _____ in the future.

Summary and conclusion:

In the first seven weeks of this project we have successfully reduced ___ by ___%, increased ___ by $_____, … This gives us an overall reduction of ____ of __ and _____ of an additional ____. We have made a few mistakes like _____ and ____ that have slowed our progress and we will correct this by _____ in the next ____ weeks/months.

References – if you need them. I don’t require them unless you specifically call out something that the boss may need to take a deeper look at.