What are business operations? like this... no, that's not what we're talking about.
Business operations are different and are a huge part, if not
the main part of the majority of all companies and organizations. Hi I'm Laurence Gartside and
I give online training and I'm a consultant in business operations management through my site,
Rowtons Training, helping you level up your business operations fundamentals.
The weird thing about operations in business in organizations is that they basically all have
them, yet so many don't use that word at all - but make no mistake, basically every organization does
have operations and they are typically the most important part of it. Operations are the core
daily activities that an organization does every day to create value and earn a profit.
They're one of the essential business functions alongside the likes of marketing or finance.
Operations are the systems of processes, the activities actually creating that value,
transforming inputs into higher value outputs - be that products or services. It's not just about
normal businesses either. All organizations from non-profit charities schools public sector - they
all do stuff with people, machines knowledge, money, energy - processes transforming inputs to
(hopefully) higher value outputs. Examples of business operations could be
a car factory assembling cars or a restaurant cooking and serving food,
an airline flying people around the world, a call center answering questions, a hospital making
people better. These are all operations-intensive organizations. These are the action parts,
the doing, making helping, building parts of the business - the operations. Taking inputs,
transforming them through processes to create higher value outputs. A car factory is
transforming metal to expensive cars, a hospital, transforming sick people to healthy people, a
call center transforming people with questions to people with answers and a restaurant transforming
ingredients to fed and happy customers. They all take in inputs, such as labor, materials, energy,
skills, process knowledge and put them through a particular and coordinated set of processes
to create higher value outputs which can be products or services or both.
As wildly different as each of these organizations seem from each other,
from an operations manager point of view they have an incredible amount of similarities and the
success of all these organizations to effectively and profitably do what they do depends, to a very
large amount, on their operations management; balancing resources and capacity to meet demand,
coordinating resources to be ready where and when they are needed,
forecasting, demand management, capacity planning, scheduling, resource requirements planning,
systems design, performance management and operations strategy. The operations function
of a business has to work in coordinated harmony with all the other functions of the organization,
very often with overlapping or differently defined boundaries - other functions,
like purchasing, logistics, finance, marketing, sales, product design or customer service.
Sometimes, one company's auxiliary function is another's core operations. If you are
a logistics company, then your core operations is doing logistics
or perhaps you are a marketing company and doing the marketing for your clients is
how you generate value but then the act of marketing your own services to new clients
could be put down as a separate function. There are so many different businesses out there.
What type of organization do you work in? Do you call it operations or something else entirely?
Comment below and let's see what crazy range of things we're all up to. So, operations is the
function of the business where the stuff gets done where the value is created where the metal gets
forged the customer's problems get solved or the service gets provided. Operations are everywhere!
Thank you for watching this video. Please remember to thumbs-up, subscribe, ring the
bell and share your insights below and if you want to learn more about operations management,
supply chain, logistics, inventory, performance improvements, well,
watch my next video or check out my library of courses on my site RowtonsTraining.com.
All right then Crack On!
you