There are often several aspects to a business that have to be optimized in order for the company to prosper and reach its full potential.
Among these include administration, sales, marketing, human resources, and operations management.
So what’s the deal? What is the importance of operations management to your brand strategy and maximise your business profit?
Here, we’re going to talk further about the importance of operation management and what it means for your business.
- Why is operations management important?
- How can good operations management benefit your organization in the short and long term?
- How can operations management help your service delivery to clients achieve optimal customer satisfaction?
However, before we go on any further, the first thing we will have to look at is the main definitions of operation management and how it works in a corporate setting.
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What Are The Goals of Operations Management?
In any business, operations management can be defined as the process by which their products or services are produced. It is a department of management in the organization whereby those in charge plan, design, and effectively manage the making of a product or service.
A company that applies operation management successfully should be able to achieve these objectives:
Fulfill Quality Standards
Operations management plays an important role for any business because it ensures that the service provider provides the best quality products or services for customers.
This means that a certain standard of quality must define operations management in order to keep the business going.
For sustainability, one cannot disappoint customers. As such, sourcing for the best materials, ensuring efficiency, and more are the benchmarks of why operations management is important – they are all part of the quality management process.
Attract More Customers
When your products or services are at their best, word about your brand will spread.
Hence, operations management’s importance also includes building up brand awareness and letting your products or services speak to the customers as a form of customer-driven marketing strategy.
Positive feedback towards your business is always a plus point that will contribute to your marketing efforts. [1] In fact, people will trust reviews by other customers much more than they trust content coming from your production facility.
The best way to generate positive reviews for your business is to make sure your supply chain management or logistics is carried out well to ensure all available resources are put into the output or production system.
Operation management helps ensure all business activities are done to meet customer needs.
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Maximize Profit
When operations management is optimized, you’ll be able to maximize production and even increase it to meet customer demand. This will inevitably lead to an increase in profits for your organization too.
Additionally, it is also the goal of operations management to cut down production costs and come up with products and services that are cost-effective.
Products and services that are cost-effective will also be more affordable for the consumer. Hence, quality management and supply chain management should reach their goals to produce quality products without the need to overspend.
What Are the Key Benefits of Operation Management? 5 Advantages of Applying Operation Management To Your Business
The main operations management’s importance is to increase your company’s efficiency in production system, apart from just focusing on a revenue increase.
When practiced well, operations management can have many benefits for your business:
1. Increasing Competitiveness Within The Industry
When your organization has operating management in control, you have a better competitive advantage with both internal and external factors influencing your particular industry.
This means you can fine-tune proper operations management details so that you perform better than your competitors providing the same products or services.
When you know what the role operations management ensures in industry standards, it will be easier to improve them to excel in terms of product quality and added value.
You will also be able to infuse in your own unique features as an operations manager to make your products and services stand out. [2]
Pro Tip: Make sure you liaise with other departments to know how you can add value and product quality to your services and products to make them more competitive.
2. Managing Costs and Profitability
One of the key components in operation management is the ability to convert input like materials, resources, and tech into the final product.
With proper operations management, you will be able to bring down the costs of the resources you put in. The best way is to ensure that you do not compromise on the quality of these resources whilst ensuring you don’t overspend.
Pro Tip: Cheap materials and all the resources aren’t always the answer to keeping production costs down. Look at maximizing production efficiency instead.
3. Making Use of Technology in Production
Operations management involves using tech to make the production process smoother, faster, and more efficient overall. As an operation manager, you will be exposed to the latest developments that can help your organization.
Among the technologies available would include planning and tracking software, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, big data reporting systems, and much more.
Choosing the most suitable technology for your operations can bring it to another level of productivity. [3] Operations management helps make tech one of the key benefits of producing goods.
Pro Tip: Networking with others in your industry and attending business seminars/conventions is one way to help you keep up with the latest output-related tech.
4. Waste Reduction
In any discussion about the significance of operations management, we have to consider that all inputs and resources used by the production process are precious.
One thing that operation management can achieve is to allow you to identify where resources are being wasted. This can be through inventory control or checks, lean manufacturing strategies, and JIT inventory management.
Overall, you can cut manufacturing processes costs and maximize the usage of resources. You’ll also be able to find valuable ways to recycle waste or re-purpose them in a value-added manner.
Pro Tip: One industry’s waste is another industry’s raw materials. Look at how you can reduce costs by profiting from any of your waste products.
5. Enhancing Employee Motivation
Employee experience is part of the importance of management. This includes being able to motivate your employees to reach their full potential. An organization with unmotivated personnel will face all sorts of productivity issues.
Operations management will allow you to effectively find ways to make your employees love their jobs. This includes enhancing communication, increasing access to support, optimum utilization of mentoring systems, and providing an effective plan to reward hard work and achievements. [4]
Scheduling personnel is an example of operations management, whereby you have to determine schedules that don’t overwork any employee.
This can be a daunting task for an operation manager, but if done well, it can enhance your team’s motivation to continue working with your organization.
Pro Tip: Developing a rewards system involves communicating with your employees to see what they value most. Operations management ensures that you avoid making assumptions and identify the true motivators in your organization.
How Operations Management Functions With Other Departments
Operations management is basically a department within a business organization, one of several departments that are needed for the organization to function.
The other departments usually found in a business include finance, marketing, human resource, sales, and IT.
The size and number of staff working in operations depend on the size of the company itself.
As such, the operations department doesn’t function alone and it has to constantly communicate with other departments in order for production goals to be accomplished within the organization.
The operations department is highly crucial as it is responsible for delivering quality goods and services.
This is because the marketing department acts like a ‘bridge’ that connects the customers to the products of companies.
Transforming Inputs: The Role of Operation Management
Understanding what is operations management means understanding that it is a process of transformation. That is, operation management’s main function is to transform inputs into goods and services.
As an operations manager, it is important to maintain these aspects to build a customer base that’s loyal. These inputs can come in many forms, including:
- Human resource or labor
- Capital and financing
- Raw materials
- Technology
- Assets like land and buildings
- Information and methodology
The main function of operations management in any organization is to ensure that this transformation process is run as efficiently as possible. When efficiency is discussed, it simply means that the transformation process must:
- Be cost-effective
- Minimize wastage
- Add value to the product or service for customers
- Not harm the environment
- Be fast and efficient
- Be able to meet demand
When your operations management is successful, this will make it easier for the management of other departments to be done much more easily too.
Reasons to study operations management include the need to understand how operational management relates to other business activities.
Once you have an end product or service from the transformation process, it cannot just lie dormant.
It has to be sold in order to generate an income for your company. As an operation manager, you’ll have to understand how your business products connect to the customers.
What is Marketing Operations Management?
This is where marketing management comes in. This department in any company is responsible for informing the general public that business products exist. Their job also involves making these products as attractive as possible.
Marketing itself has many methods, channels, and strategies. As a general rule, the most modern and effective marketing platforms online more often than not incorporate elements like:
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Affiliate marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- And the usage of various Google Marketing Tools as part of their services offered.
Just like management operations, operations management also involves identifying and optimizing the various systems and processes involved.
It is defined as the planning, monitoring, staffing, and controlling of the tasks, performance, and direction of the marketing team along with its collaterals.
Among the systems that one has to understand to have better controls over marketing includes:
Data analytics
The ability to interpret data connected to client engagement with your brand in order to effectively manage, improve, and sustain customer experience or maintenance.
Statistical Reports
These will help you evaluate performances in terms of sales, and also which products are the best selling in order to organize future planning for ensuing campaigns.
Managing customer relations
Putting systems in place to deal with customer service, answer queries, and follow-ups in an efficient manner to build healthy customer relationships and encourage customer loyalty.
Managing Content
These include marketing content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok as well as website content. It also includes monitoring offline content such as billboards, print ads, and the like.
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Taking Care of Your Digital Assets
All forms of images, videos, written articles, copywriting, and more are your organizations’ marketing digital assets and have to be stored securely as well as backed up.
Analyzing Calls
Having systems in place to monitor live interactions with customers will help you troubleshoot problems and improve their call experience for better customer satisfaction.
Operations Management Strategies: Perfecting Processes Involved
These days, operations management definition also includes the ability to meet customer demand with effective operations management that covers the supply chain management field.
Here are some of the effective operations management strategies you can employ for the long term:
1. Managing Resources
As an operation manager, it should come in nature to have an optimal utilization of quality control management process for all resources including human resources, raw materials, equipment, and technology. Raw materials should always be part of your strategy for better operation management.
2. Research and Development
Managing processes signifies to prioritize inventory, quantity & quality control, and to effectively manage the manufacturing process. There should always be R&D efforts to increase output efficiency, durability, reliability, and explore waste reduction.
3. Departmental Collaborations
Effective operations management cannot function on its own so you will need to speak to the operations managers from other departments in order to ensure that production planning is done on the same page.
4. Communicating with Customers
Revenue growth depends highly on customers, and therefore their feedback should be taken into consideration to ensure consumer satisfaction. To achieve and maintain a good reputation, the customer needs should factor into your process design flawlessly.
5. Using Data Wisely
Data is crucial to your business because it gives you knowledge about more than just operations. Be sure to gather data in relation to the different departments and operations to ensure the knowledge, and your skills are not interpreted in a silo.
6. Make Your Process Visible
Whenever you make any slight process improvement to your process as an operations manager, make sure to promote it and let your consumers know. Customers like to know how things are made or developed in your production facility or organization to have higher customer satisfaction.
Key Takeaways Operations Management
As an operations manager, it is important to understand your role in relation to the bigger picture in the cycle of operation management.
Operation management is not a difficult or technical science. However, it does require you to set objectives for targeting increased revenue, optimizing service delivery, doing capacity planning, and ensuring quality products.
Good operation management can cause a revenue increase, but you will have to work hard to make sure you reach organisational goals and provide customer satisfaction.
This is why if you’re considering a career in operations management, you should consider an MBA in operations management. You can always speak to us about starting your educational journey too.
Operation management is also related to online marketing, and therefore also SEO Malaysia.
At One Search Pro, our operations management professional team provides SEO and SEM management services, so you don’t have to start from scratch researching these topics to grow your brand.
