Introduction to Operations Management

What you study

The course builds the basics of operations management around process improvement. It looks at the trade-off between cost and quality, the efficiency frontier, and the factors that inhibit a system from performing well. From there it moves into process analysis, where you map the steps in a process and find where effort is lost.

Skills that carry over

The stated skill list goes beyond the title: capacity planning, quality management, inventory control and root cause analysis all appear. The ideas transfer to service work as readily as to factory floors, which makes the course useful for service teams, project managers and anyone who inherits a slow workflow.

Who should take it

• Early-career staff moving into an operations or process role.
• Team leads who want a shared vocabulary for discussing bottlenecks.
• Learners who want to see how supply chain management connects to the work inside one organization.