PRESENTED BY: AMNA SAFDAR ALI

Q. 1 a)

Justify that operations management is a multi disciplinary function with relevant examples.

b)

Organizations must focus on the social issues. You are advised to highlight the social issues involved in operation management and suggest possible measures. A)

OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services. Major, overall activities often include product creation, development, production and distribution. (These activities are also associated with Product and Service Management) Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluations of processes. A great deal of focus is on efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Therefore, operations management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes. Ultimately, the nature of how operations management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of the products or services in the organization, for example, on retail, manufacturing or wholesale. MULTI DISCIPLINARY FUNCTION Purchasing Control and Coordinating Function of Management Product and Service Management Quality Management Inventory Management Supply Chain Management Logistics and Transportation Management Facilities Management Configuration Management Distribution Channels Enterprise Resource Planning

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PROCUREMENT (PURCHASING) PRACTICES This topic reviews guidelines for buying various materials from suppliers and vendors materials, including computers, services from lawyers, insurance, etc. MANAGEMENT CONTROL AND COORDINATING FUNCTION Management control and coordination includes a broad range of activities to ensure that organizational goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient fashion.

PRODUCT AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT As noted above, the major activities involved in product and service management are similar to those in operations management. However, operations management is focused on the operations of the entire organization, rather than managing a product or service.

QUALITY MANAGEMENT Quality management is crucial to effective operations management, particularly continuous improvement. More recent advancements in quality, such as benchmarking and Total Quality Management, have resulted in advancements to operations management as well.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT Costs can be substantial to store and move inventory. Innovative methods, such as Just-in-Time inventory control, can save costs and move products and services to customers more quickly.

LOGISTICS AND TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT Logistics is focused on the flow of materials and goods from suppliers, through the organization and to the customers, with priority on efficiency and cost effectiveness.

FACILITIES MANAGEMENT Effective operations management depends a great deal on effective management of facilities, such as buildings, computer systems, signage, lighting, etc.

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CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT It's important to track the various versions of products and services. Consider the various versions of software that continually are produced, each with its own version number. Tracking these versions is configuration management.

B)

SOCIAL ISSUES INVOLVED IN OPERATION MANAGEMENT

Perhaps the most practical approach is to view ethics as a catalyst that causes managers to take socially responsible actions. The movement toward including ethics as a critical part of management education began in the 1970s, grew significantly in the 1980s, and is expected to continue growing. Hence, business ethics is a critical component of business leadership. Ethics can be defined as our concern for good behavior. We feel an obligation to consider not only our own personal well-being but also that of other human beings. This is similar to the precept of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In business, ethics can be defined as the ability and willingness to reflect on values in the course of the organization's decision-making process, to determine how values and decisions affect the various stakeholder groups, and to establish how managers can use these precepts in day-to-day company operations. Ethical business leaders strive for fairness and justice within the confines of sound management practices. SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY The term social responsibility means different things to different people. Generally, corporate social responsibility is the obligation to take action that protects and improves the welfare of society as a whole as well as organizational interests. According to the concept of corporate social responsibility, a manager must strive to achieve both organizational and societal goals. Current perspectives regarding the fundamentals of social responsibility of businesses are listed and discussed through the Davis model of corporate social responsibility, areas of corporate social responsibility, and varying opinions on social responsibility. A model of corporate social responsibility that was developed by Keith Davis provides five propositions that describe why and how businesses should adhere to the obligation to take action that protects and improves the welfare of society and the organization:

Proposition 1: Social responsibility arises from social power.

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Proposition 2: Business shall operate as an open system, with open receipt of inputs from society and open disclosure of its operation to the public.

Proposition 3: The social costs and benefits of an activity, product, or service shall be thoroughly calculated and considered in deciding whether to proceed with it.

Proposition 4: Social costs related to each activity, product, or service shall be passed on to the consumer.

Proposition 5: Business institutions, as citizens, have the responsibility to become involved in certain social problems that are outside their normal areas of operation.

The areas in which business can become involved to protect and improve the welfare of society are numerous and diverse. Some of the most publicized of these areas are urban affairs, consumer affairs, environmental affairs, and employment practices. Although numerous businesses are involved in socially responsible activities, much controversy persists about whether such involvement is necessary or appropriate. There are several arguments for and against businesses performing socially responsible activities.

SOCIAL RESPONSIVENESS

Social responsiveness is the degree of effectiveness and efficiency an organization displays in pursuing its social responsibilities. The greater the degree of effectiveness and efficiency, the more socially responsive the organization is said to be. The socially responsive organization that is both effective and efficient meets its social responsibilities without wasting organizational resources in the process. Determining exactly which social responsibilities an organization should pursue and then deciding how to pursue them are perhaps the two most critical decisionmaking aspects of maintaining a high level of social responsiveness within an organization. That is, managers must decide whether their organization should undertake the activities on its own or acquire the help of outsiders with more expertise in the area. In addition to decision making, various approaches to meeting social obligations are another determinant of an organization's level of social responsiveness. A desirable and socially responsive approach to meeting social obligations involves the following:

Incorporating social goals into the annual planning process

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Seeking comparative industry norms for social programs Presenting reports to organization members, the board of directors, and stockholders on progress in social responsibility

Experimenting with different approaches for measuring social performance Attempting to measure the cost of social programs as well as the return on social program investments

The social obligation approach, for example, considers business as having primarily economic purposes and confines social responsibility activity mainly to conformance to existing laws. The socially responsible approach sees business as having both economic and societal goals. The social responsiveness approach considers business as having both societal and economic goals as well as the obligation to anticipate upcoming social problems and to work actively to prevent their appearance. AREAS OF MEASUREMENT To be consistent, measurements to gauge organizational progress in reaching socially responsible objectives can be performed. The specific areas in which individual companies actually take such measurements vary, of course, depending on the specific objectives of the companies. All companies, however, probably should take such measurements in at least the following four major areas: 1. Economic function: This measurement gives some indication of the economic contribution the organization is making to society. 2. Quality-of-life: The measurement of quality of life should focus on whether the organization is improving or degrading the general quality of life in society. 3. Social investment: The measurement of social investment deals with the degree to which the organization is investing both money and human resources to solve community social problems. 4. Problem-solving: The measurement of problem solving should focus on the degree to which the organization deals with social problems.

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Q. 2 Describe the working of production systems like FMS, GT, and OPT in different organizational settings.

PRODUCTION SYSTEM
The practical expression of Toyota's people and customer-oriented philosophy is known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). This is not a rigid company-imposed procedure but a set of principles that have been proven in day-to-day practice over many years. Many of these ideas have been adopted and imitated all over the world. TPS has three desired outcomes:

To provide the customer with the highest quality vehicles, at lowest possible cost, in a timely manner with the shortest possible lead times.

To provide members with work satisfaction, job security and fair treatment. It gives the company flexibility to respond to the market, achieve profit through cost reduction activities and long-term prosperity.

TPS strives for the absolute elimination of waste, overburden and unevenness in all areas to allow members to work smoothly and efficiently. The foundations of TPS are built on standardization to ensure a safe method of operation and a consistent approach to quality. Toyota members seek to continually improve their standard processes and procedures in order to ensure maximum quality, improve efficiency and eliminate waste. This is known as kaizen and is applied to every sphere of the company's activities.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Like all mass-production systems, the Toyota process requires that all tasks, both human and mechanical, be very precisely defined and standardized to ensure maximum quality, eliminate waste and improve efficiency. Toyota Members have a responsibility not only to follow closely these standardized work guidelines but also to seek their continual improvement. This is simply common sense - since it

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is clear that inherent inefficiencies or problems in any procedure will always be most apparent to those closest to the process. The day-to-day improvements that Members and their Team Leaders make to their working practices and equipment are known as kaizen. But the term also has a wider meeting: it means a continual striving for improvement in every sphere of the Company's activities - from the most basic manufacturing process to serving the customer and the wider community beyond.

JUST IN TIME

It is perhaps not widely known that the 'just in time' approach to production that has now gained almost universal acceptance in world manufacturing was actually pioneered by Toyota. In fact, a Toyota engineer coined the term itself. This, too, is a simple but inspired application of common sense. Essentially, 'just in time' manufacturing consists of allowing the entire production process to be regulated by the natural laws of supply and demand. Customer demand stimulates production of a vehicle. In turn the production of the vehicle stimulates production and delivery of the necessary parts and so on. The result is that the right parts and materials are manufactured and provided in the exact amount needed - and when and where they are needed.

SUPPLIERS & TPS

Just-in-time manufacturing and other elements of the Toyota Production System work best when they are a common basis for synchronizing activity throughout the production sequence. This is an egalitarian arrangement in which each process in the production flow becomes the customer for the preceding process and each process becomes a supermarket to the following process. Independent suppliers participate on an equal footing with Toyota operations in the production flow, each fulfilling their own role in that flow. The only participant in the entire sequence who does not answer to anyone is the customer who selects a vehicle in the marketplace.

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Suppliers who participate in the Toyota Production System enjoy the same benefits that Toyota does from the system. Just-in-time manufacturing can dissolve inventories at parts suppliers just as readily and effectively as it does at Toyota's assembly plants. Product quality improves, too. That's because the Toyota Production System includes measures for illuminating defects whenever and wherever they occur. Suppliers who adopt the Toyota Production System also report improvements in employeemanagement relations. That is mainly because the system provides for an expanded role for employees in designing and managing their own work. It brings together employees and management in the joint pursuit of improvements in productivity, quality, and working conditions.

FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM (FMS)

. A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in the case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories. The first category, machine flexibility, covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part. The second category is called routing flexibility, which consists of the ability to use multiple machines to perform the same operation on a part, as well as the system's ability to absorb large-scale changes, such as in volume, capacity, or capability. ADVANTAGES 1. Reduced manufacturing times, 2. Lower cost per unit produced, 3. Greater labor productivity, 4. Greater machine efficiency, 5. Improved quality, 6. Increased system reliability, 7. Reduced parts inventories, 8. Adaptability to CAD/CAM operations.

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DISADVANTAGES 1. Cost to implement, 2. Substantial pre-planning required,

INDUSTRIAL FMS COMMUNICATION

Training FMS with learning robot SCORBOT-ER 4u, workbench CNC Mill and CNC Lathe An Industrial Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) consists of robots, Computer-controlled Machines, Numerical controlled machines (CNC), instrumentation devices, computers, sensors, and other stand alone systems such as inspection machines. The use of robots in the production segment of manufacturing industries promises a variety of benefits ranging from high utilization to high volume of productivity. Each Robotic cell or node will be located along a material handling system such as a conveyor or automatic guided vehicle. The production of each part or work-piece will require a different combination of manufacturing nodes..

GROUP TECHNOLOGY The complexity of products is constantly increasing. To meet the world's growing demand on diversity, highly differentiating products are required. This as well as historically grown product programs lead to changing product structures with a high number of variations in products and processes. In general the huge diversity of parts and processes that alternatively combines with the lack of transparency and product- and manufacturing process-related information is the outcome. Here group technology can make a contribution to identify similarities and patterns of objects and processes. A huge number of different methods cover a wide range of applications in nearly all branches of production. The main field of application of group technology can be characterized as follows:

Finding similar work pieces or similar manufacturing sequences with respect to function, design and manufacturing criterias,

Standardization and structuring of similar business processes, Solving of similar industrial engineering problems.

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Q. 3 Identify the quality cost elements associated with the institutions listed below. Define each of these elements and suggest how each might be quantified in practice? A university A Hospital A Bank The Local Bus Line A text book Publisher A manufacturer of mens shoes

QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH A TEXT UNIVERSITY A University is a manual of instruction in any branch of study. University are produced according to the demands of educational institutions. Quality cost elements of a university are given below: Teaching staff Building Area Facilities Recommended books Course offerings

Above are the quality cost elements of a university that can describe the quality of a university. The University market does not operate in exactly the same manner as most consumer markets. First, the end consumers (students) do not select the product, and the product is not purchased by faculty or professors. Therefore, price is removed from the purchasing decision, giving the producer (publishers) disproportionate market power to set prices high. Similarities are found in the pharmaceutical industry, which sells its wares to doctors, rather than the ultimate end-user (i.e. patient). This fundamental difference in the market is often cited as the primary reason that prices are out of control. The term "Broken Market" first appeared in Economist James Koch's analysis of the market commissioned by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

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This situation is exacerbated by the lack of competition in the textbook market. Consolidation in the past few decades has reduced the number of major textbook companies from around 30 to just a handful. Consequently, there is less competition than there used to be, and the high cost of starting up keeps new companies from entering.

QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH HOSPITAL Quality cost elements of a hospital are following under: Location Qualified Staff Maintenance Facilities Latest Equipments

Location: of a hospital are very much important and basic factor to describe the quality matters of hospital because good quality hospitals select the location that will be best as environment and all other aspects. Qualified Staff: plays vital role to describe the quality of any institution and organization. In the case of Hospital if nominate and qualified staff will be there the quality line will be increase. Maintenance: Maintenance is also very important factor to describe the quality of any organization. If organization maintains every thing in the best condition it will impact on the overall quality reputation of the hospital. Facilities: are another important issue in the case of hospital. There are many kind of hospitals provide many kind of facilities but good private hospital provide extra facilities to the patients that is symbol of their quality maintenance. Equipments: Latest and modern equipments also very necessary for a hospital to describe the quality of a hospital. If there will be latest and good condition equipment in the hospital it will create the good impact regarding quality to the customers. This assignment will summarizes the findings from a study of the ingredients that contribute to excellence in hospital quality. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) 2 has combined quantitative research with case studies and telephone interviews to develop a typology of the key factors driving the achievement of good results and successful quality improvement (QI) efforts in hospital care.

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QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH BANKS Amid sweeping regulatory change, slow economic growth and tightened margins, banks today are increasingly focused on their most important stakeholders their customers. Yet, despite their best efforts to attract and retain customers, customer confidence levels in banks remain low. In response, customers are changing their behavior and demanding lower fees for higher levels of service or other improvements. If these demands are not met, they are increasingly likely to shop around at other banks for competitive rates for services and products. To build on our previous global consumer banking survey in 2011, and to help banks better understand what they must do to build and maintain customer relationships, we surveyed 28,560 banking customers across 35 countries to learn more about their needs and preferences. Our banking teams around the world analyzed the responses. We hope the data and survey findings are useful to you when planning strategies and adapting your business models to attain greater customer loyalty and satisfaction.

SURVEY SUGGESTS THAT FOR BANKS TO REMAIN COMPETITIVE, THEY MUST:

Give customers the opportunity to choose by making promises and service offers more transparent.

Rebalance fee structures to achieve the clarity and sustainability required by regulators and investors.

Help customers shape their own banking experiences by improving how they provide information and advice, recruiting online affinity groups and by developing flexible loyalty programs.

Develop models around customer needs by reprioritizing spending, including increasing the use of low-cost digital models and using more innovative technology.

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COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE

How long is the walk? Can one walk safely along and across the streets to and from transit stops? Is there a functional and continuous accessible path to the stop, and is the stop accessible to people with disabilities?

Is the service reliable? How long is the wait? Is shelter available at the stop while waiting? How comfortable is the trip? Will one have to stand? Are there an adequate number of spaces?

How much will the trip cost? How many transfers are required? How long will the trip take in total? How long relative to other modes? Are the vehicles and facilities clean?

SERVICE DELIVERY

Reliability: how often is the service provided as promised? Customer service: what is the quality of direct contacts between passengers and staff and more importantly, the customers overall perception of service quality? Comfort: what is the passengers physical comfort level as they wait for and use transit service?

SAFETY AND SECURITY This relates to the likelihood or more importantly perceived likelihood that one will be involved in an accident (safety) or become the victim of a crime (security) while using public transport. An example question in this category:

Are there security concernswalking, waiting, or in the vehicle?

QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE LOCAL BUS LINE When we consider public transport, except for particular specialized services and first class services on rail networks, passengers do not generally have the option of purchasing an additional quality element. The practice thus far in public transportation planning and management is that conventional planning tends to overlook service quality impacts.

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With regards to the choice market, the public transport provision has to be competitive against the private car in meeting travelling needs of the user. As an example given in Litman (2008), car owners have the option and are often willing to pay considerable sums to include a variety of optional extras such as satellite navigation systems, leather interiors in the car. Whilst the basic need of the car owner is a means of provision of transportation from point A to point B, the quality elements and more importantly the image associated with ownership and use of this car is clearly an element of importance in the decision making process of car ownership and purchase. If more car users are to be persuaded to choose the option of public transport instead, the entire package of public transport options available has to be improved considerably. When approaching this group, the objective of quality is designed to entice these choice users by ensuring that public transport caters both to their basic transportation needs and also to their implied needs. For them, public transport needs to deliver at least a journey experience rivalling that, or better than, the private car. Hence measures improving the image of public transport, enhancing safety and personal security, reducing overcrowding are targeted at this segment of the market.

QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH A TEXT BOOK PUBLISHER A textbook or course book is a manual of instruction in any branch of study. Textbooks are produced according to the demands of educational institutions. Although most textbooks are only published in printed format, many are now available as online electronic books and increasingly, although illegally, in scanned format in P2P networks. The textbook market does not operate in exactly the same manner as most consumer markets. First, the end consumers (students) do not select the product, and the product is not purchased by faculty or professors. Therefore, price is removed from the purchasing decision, giving the producer (publishers) disproportionate market power to set prices high. Similarities are found in the pharmaceutical industry, which sells its wares to doctors, rather than the ultimate end-user (i.e. patient). This fundamental difference in the market is often cited as the primary reason that prices are out of control. The term "Broken Market" first appeared in Economist James Koch's analysis of the market commissioned by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

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This situation is exacerbated by the lack of competition in the textbook market. Consolidation in the past few decades has reduced the number of major textbook companies from around 30 to just a handful. Consequently, there is less competition than there used to be, and the high cost of starting up keeps new companies from entering. QUALITY COST ELEMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH MANUFACTURER OF MENS SHOWS

Quality Cost elements of a show company According to trend Making Quality Material used Designing Advertising Pricing Strategy

According to Trend: Product should be according to the latest trend used in the society, Show Company has to follow the latest trends in the society and then design the show. Quality: Quality of shows should be acceptable for the consumers according to their use of shows. Material Used: Company should use the quality material during making of mens shows. Designing: Designing should be according to the demand of consumers and time to time company should introduce the new designs in the market. Advertising: Advertising is very important for the quality maintenance of any product in these days. High quality adds would be create good quality impacts on the consumer mind. Pricing: Pricing of product should be according to the market trend this will also increase the quality of your product.

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Q. 4 In a stock company, marketing department makes a sales forecast each year by developing a sales force composite. Meanwhile, operations make a sales forecast based on past experience and trends. The operation forecast usually turn out to be an increase over last year but still 20 percent less than the forecast of marketing department. How should forecasting in the company be done?

FORECASTING
Forecasting is the process of making statements about events whose actual outcomes (typically) have not yet been observed. A commonplace example might be estimation of some variable of interest at some specified future date. Prediction is a similar, but more general term. Both might refer to formal statistical methods employing time series, cross-sectional or longitudinal data, or alternatively to less formal judge mental methods. Usage can differ between areas of application: for example, in hydrology, the terms "forecast" and "forecasting" are sometimes reserved for estimates of values at certain specific future times, while the term "prediction" is used for more general estimates, such as the number of times floods will occur over a long period. Risk and uncertainty are central to forecasting and prediction; it is generally considered good practice to indicate the degree of uncertainty attaching to forecasts. In any case, the data must be up to date in order for the forecast to be as accurate as possible.[1] Although quantitative analysis can be very precise, it is not always appropriate. Some experts in the field of forecasting have advised against the use of mean square error to compare forecasting methods CATEGORIES OF FORECASTING METHODS QUALITATIVE VS QUANTITATIVE METHODS Qualitative forecasting techniques are subjective, based on the opinion and judgment of consumers, experts; appropriate when past data is not available. It is usually applied to

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intermediate-long range decisions. Examples of qualitative forecasting methods are informed opinion and judgment, the Delphi method, market research, historical life-cycle analogy. Quantitative forecasting models are used to estimate future demands as a function of past data; appropriate when past data are available. The method is usually applied to short-intermediate range decisions. Examples of quantitative forecasting methods are:[citation
needed]

last period

demand, simple and weighted moving averages (N-Period), simple exponential smoothing, multiplicative seasonal indexes. REFERENCE CLASS FORECASTING Reference class forecasting was developed by Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg to eliminate or reduce bias in forecasting by focusing on distributional information about past, similar outcomes to that being forecasted. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, calls Flyvbjerg's counsel to use reference class forecasting to de-bias forecasts, "the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting. TIME SERIES METHODS Time series methods use historical data as the basis of estimating future outcomes.

Moving average Weighted moving average Kalman filtering Exponential smoothing Autoregressive moving average (ARMA) Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)

CAUSAL / ECONOMETRIC FORECASTING METHODS Some forecasting methods use the assumption that it is possible to identify the underlying factors that might influence the variable that is being forecast. For example, including information about weather conditions might improve the ability of a model to predict umbrella sales. This is a model of seasonality which shows a regular pattern of up and down fluctuations. In addition to

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weather, seasonality can also be due to holidays and customs such as predicting that sales in college football apparel will be higher during football season as opposed to the off season. Casual forecasting methods are also subject to the discretion of the forecaster. There are several informal methods which do not have strict algorithms, but rather modest and unstructured guidance. One can forecast based on, for example, linear relationships. If one variable is linearly related to the other for a long enough period of time, it may be beneficial to predict such a relationship in the future. This is quite different from the aforementioned model of seasonality whose graph would more closely resemble a sine or cosine wave. The most important factor when performing this operation is using concrete and substantiated data. Forecasting off of another forecast produces inconclusive and possibly erroneous results. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE METHODS

Artificial neural networks Group method of data handling Support vector machines

Often these are done today by specialized programs loosely labeled

Data mining

OTHER METHODS

Simulation Prediction market Probabilistic forecasting and Ensemble forecasting

Business forecasters and practitioners sometimes use different terminology in the industry. They refer to the PMAD as the MAPE, although they compute this as a volume weighted MAPE For more information see Calculating demand forecast accuracy. Reference class forecasting was developed to increase forecasting accuracy by framing the forecasting problem so as to take into account available distributional information. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, calls the use of reference class forecasting

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"the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting. Forecasting accuracy, in contrary to belief, cannot be increased by the addition of experts in the subject area relevant to the phenomenon to be forecast. APPLICATIONS OF FORECASTING The process of climate change and increasing energy prices has led to the usage of Egan Forecasting of buildings. The method uses forecasting to reduce the energy needed to heat the building, thus reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. Forecasting is used in the practice of Customer Demand Planning in everyday business forecasting for manufacturing companies. Forecasting has also been used to predict the development of conflict situations. Experts in forecasting perform research that use empirical results to gauge the effectiveness of certain forecasting models. Research has shown that there is little difference between the accuracy of forecasts performed by experts knowledgeable of the conflict situation of interest and that performed by individuals who knew much less. Similarly, experts in some studies argue that role thinking does not contribute to the accuracy of the forecast. The discipline of demand planning, also sometimes referred to as supply chain forecasting, embraces both statistical forecasting and a consensus process. An important, albeit often ignored aspect of forecasting, is the relationship it holds with planning. Forecasting can be described as predicting what the future will look like, whereas planning predicts what the future should look like. There is no single right forecasting method to use. Selection of a method should be based on your objectives and your conditions (data etc.). A good place to find a method, is by visiting a selection tree. An example of a selection tree can be found here. Forecasting has application in many situations: LIMITATIONS As proposed by Edward Lorenz in 1963, long range weather forecasts, those made at a range of two weeks or more, are impossible to definitively predict the state of the atmosphere, owing to the chaotic nature of the fluid dynamics equations involved. Extremely small errors in the initial input, such as temperatures and winds, within numerical models doubles every five days.

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Q. 5 a)

What relationship exists between layout decisions, capacity decisions, and scheduling?

b)

Compare the manual and quantitative models for process layout design. What could be the advantages of each of the model?

A)

MAKING POPULAR LAYOUT DECISIONS

Youre a Web designer, right? You fascist oppressor. What gives you the right to be so arrogant and close-minded? Amazing, isnt it? Weve only just met and here I am insulting and berating you. And you dont even know why, though you might have some idea. Let me clear it up for you: in your last three design projects, you excluded visitors, ran roughshod over user expectations, and generally displayed a lack of understanding of the medium. This is the case no matter what design techniques you used; no matter whose books you read; no matter what you did. You thug. What the blinking font am I talking about? Im talking about Web design, which requires a constant balancing of pros and cons, and which does not admit to universally applicable answers. Unfortunately, this means that when you make a choice in how to style your site, youre going to annoy somebody. Change that decision, and youll annoy somebody different. Lets take the eternal debate of fixed versus liquid (or fluid or elastic or jello or whatever term you prefer) layout. On the one hand, you have the ability to set your design layout at a fixed width, using pixels or ems or some other fixed unit of measure. This has the advantage of giving you a more-or-less controlled design space, and as a bonus can help overcome some annoying positioning bugs in IE/Win. On the down side, if a user has a really wide browser window, then theres a whole bunch of white space to the sides of the designs content; alternatively, a very narrow browser window will invoke the dreaded horizontal scrollbar (eeeek!). The other choice is to go fluid (or liquid or whatever), using mainly percentages to define the widths of layout areas. The win here is that your content will always fill the browser window, or at least some portion of it, regardless of that windows width. No ugly leftover whitespace! On the other hand, users with really wide windows will get really long lines of text, which most

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people find difficult to read; at the other end, a really narrow window can mean single-word lines of text or, worse, some content overlapping other content.

CAPACITY DECISIONS He Psychiatric Consultation Service at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) sees medical and surgical inpatients with comorbid psychiatric symptoms and conditions. Such consultations require the integration of medical and psychiatric knowledge. During their thrice-weekly rounds, Dr. Huffman and Dr. Stern discuss the diagnosis and management of conditions confronted. These discussions have given rise to rounds reports that will prove useful for clinicians practicing at the interface of medicine and psychiatry. One of the most common reasons for a psychiatric consultation in the general hospital is to help decide whether a patient has the clarity of mind to agree to or refuse a treatment or procedure. Such decisions require the consideration of many factors, and patients may have the capacity to make some decisionsbut not othersregarding their medical care. Have you ever been puzzled about whether a patient has the capacity to make treatment decisions? If the patient lacks the capacity to make a certain decision, do you know what to do next? The following case of a man with fever and confusion highlights several of the issues germane to capacity decisions. The discussion and appended references should clarify key issues in the determination of capacity.

SCHEDULING Scheduling is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. In manufacturing, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation and reduce costs. Production scheduling tools greatly outperform older manual scheduling methods. These provide the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces which can be used to visually optimize real-time work loads in various stages of production, and pattern recognition allows the software to automatically create scheduling opportunities which might not be apparent without

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this view into the data. For example, an airline might wish to minimize the number of airport gates required for its aircraft, in order to reduce costs, and scheduling software can allow the planners to see how this can be done, by analyzing time tables, aircraft usage, or the flow of passengers. Companies use backward and forward scheduling to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials. Forward scheduling is planning the tasks from the date resources become available to determine the shipping date or the due date. Backward scheduling is planning the tasks from the due date or required-by date to determine the start date and/or any changes in capacity required. The benefits of production scheduling include:

Process change-over reduction Inventory reduction, leveling Reduced scheduling effort Increased production efficiency Labor load leveling Accurate delivery date quotes Real time information

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(b)

THE MANUAL AND QUANTITATIVE MODELS FOR PROCESS LAYOUT

DESIGN

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Operation Management (5568)