Operations Management and Decision Making: A Personal Reflection

This essay provides a personal reflection on the understanding and application of operations management and decision-making principles. It discusses the initial misunderstanding of the link between operations management and decision-making, highlighting the realization that effective operations management requires sound decision-making to prioritize activities and allocate resources. The essay emphasizes the practical relevance of the course, stating how it enables better resource management and task prioritization. It further explores the importance of teamwork and diverse perspectives in decision-making, drawing from group activities and case studies. The increased awareness of managing various business operations and their interconnectedness is also discussed, noting how proper management can lead to improved productivity. The reflection concludes by underscoring the critical role of operations management in ensuring organizational success.

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
AND DECISION MAKING
Name of the Student

Introduction
 Operations management kind be described as the
management of processes in an organization.
 Operations management combines and
encompasses of all the activities in an organization
like inventory, purchases and other relevant aspects
like quality and logistics as well.
 The day to day operations are run along with the
help of operations management and this makes
planning extremely important (Ford and Richardson
2013).
 Decision making can be defined as the process of
evaluating the available courses of action and
determining what is best for the organization.

Understanding of OM and decision making
 When I had first started the course, I failed to
understand the link between operations management
and decision making.
 I used to think that operations management is an
independent branch of study and that it manage
itself.
 However, this is not the case and decision making is
a key aspect of operations management.
 I learnt this fact during the course that without
decision making, operations management is
incomplete (Haslam et al. 2014).
 Decision making helps in prioritizing the activities or
the operations.

Application of learning on OM and DM
 Unlike other theoretical papers, the given
course on operations management and
Decision making goes a long way in helping
the individual to manage its resources
(Heizer 2016).
 As a manger of the organization, through
this course I ill be able to prioritize the
tasks in a better manner and use a decision
making tool to allocate the adequate
resources to the different activities in the
given organization.

 Another aspect of the subject that intrigued
my thinking was:
 whether an organization is big or small, it is
extremely important for the organizational owners
to have a proper management of the various
resources and their utilization.
 This aspect demands key decision making.
However, it is not always possible for the
organization to have a sound decision making
system (Pettigrew 2014).
 This demands or expert advise and associates who
analyses the business situations and take decisions
for the firm.

Group Activities
 After participating in various group activity operations, I
was able to learn the following:
 The manager will not be working alone
 An organization is a group of people ho need to or
together in a tangent in order to make any task successful
and even for easy implementation.
 It is very similar to working in a group, where each group
member has a set of perception which influences team
dynamics.
 The consent of all is extremely important.
 The individual team members had done their own reading
and narrated stories which grew my knowledge out the
subject and also elaborated upon my knowledge of
practical examples in this subject (Langley et al., 2013).

Increased awareness about managing operations
 This coursework has gone a long way in helping
me to understand the importance of managing the
various operations of a business organization
 Through the different case studies studied , I could
understand that an organization is a storehouse of
various activities and operations (Slack 2015).
 These activities are overlapping and require the
same amount of resources and energy.
 Hence, managing of these activities is one of the
most critical tasks. If the operations are not
managed we, it may lead to problems and affect
the productivity

References
 Ford, R.C. and Richardson, W.D., 2013. Ethical decision making: A review
of the empirical literature. In Citation classics from the Journal of Business
Ethics (pp. 19-44). Springer, Dordrecht.
 Haslam, S.A., van Knippenberg, D., Platow, M.J. and Ellemers, N. eds.,
2014. Social identity at work: Developing theory for organizational
practice. Psychology Press.
 Heizer, J., 2016. Operations Management, 11/e. Pearson Education India.
 Jacobs, F.R., Chase, R.B. and Lummus, R.R., 2014. Operations and supply
chain management (pp. 533-535). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
 Langley, A.N.N., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H. and Van de Ven, A.H., 2013.
Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling
temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1),
pp.1-13.
 Pettigrew, A.M., 2014. The politics of organizational decision-making.
Routledge.
 Slack, N., 2015. Operations strategy. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
