Operations management in the supply chain

Within an organization operations management is the function which interacts with and delivers products and services to customers. Operations management is not limited to the manufacture of products. Everyone, no matter what their role, is an operations manager. We all use resources, and we all have a mission to employ these resources as efficiently as possible for the benefit of the organization for which we work. ‘Efficient operations management is crucial to the success of any organization. The role of an operations manager is to provide customer service within the framework of the organizations policy and to use the resources as efficiently as possible. Simply put: the operations manager makes things happen’ (Wright and Race, 2004, p. 4). For supply chain management operations management is where, with in factories and facilities, plans are converted into reality to produce goods and services. Input resources basically consist of information, materials and utilities. They are transformed into desired outputs by the three converting components of people, process and technology. In addition to the conversion of inputs into outputs operations management is responsible for the physical flow of the supply chain. This includes the upstream flow of input resources and the downstream flow (distribution) of outputs.