Course Descriptions

Course catalog descriptions for courses offered in the F09 term.

Operations and Management Science

OMS 551 Introduction to Operations
  3 hours Core Terms Offered: F09
  Course Prerequisites: TO 501 and no credit in TO 552 

Operations Management is concerned with the efficient transformation of inputs into outputs that will effectively achieve customer satisfaction. In a dynamic, competitive world, a company's effectiveness depends significantly on how well the firm's resources are managed. Managing a company's critical performance dimensions - quality, speed, flexibility, and cost - warrants a thorough understanding of both the physical and information processes that are required for developing and manufacturing products as well as delivering them to customers. This course focuses on managerial tools for understanding these processes, and prepares managers to use the results of analysis to constantly improve the firm's operational performance.

Some of the objectives of the course are to expose you to a range of operations settings so that you understand:

  1. the role of operations and how operations support business objectives and interact with other functions in pursuit of an organization's vision, 
  2. how operations affect you, other people, and society, and
  3. the complexity, excitement, and challenges associated with managing operations.

The course develops your ability to analyze operations processes and the management of productivity and quality. It is important to understand how to diagnose an operation, to define and organize ill-structured operations problems so that they are analyzable and solvable, and to develop an implementable action plan.

You are introduced to various types of production processes and the key issues in managing them. We familiarize you with some quantitative techniques, such as linear programming, and demonstrate their use in analyzing production systems and solving operations problems.

Common application areas are addressed, such as inventory management and aggregate planning. Some of the best known and useful results in these areas are presented. Current topics are covered such as mass customization, time-based competition, automation, and/or e-commerce issues.