Operations management is responsible for taking care of design and management of services, processes, products and the chains of supply (Operations Management, 2014). Besides, operations management deals with the development and utilisation of resources, the structure of the organisational work and the process of distribution of the services that are required from the company.
APARU is the charity organisation and it is designed to help dealing with critical situations around the world. The goals of the process are to react quickly and present funds that are being requested before larger charity organisations step in and start assisting. Small projects sometimes need help to survive their initial stages of existence and development. In the situations when the future of a project is in danger, APARU and its Chief Executive Susan N’tini are ready to provide some help. The main quality of the process Susan N’tini is in charge of is its speed. There are two types of operational management – the one that deals with the products manufactured by the company and the one that is in charge of the services the organisation provides (Slack, Chambers, Johnson & Betts, 2009).
APARU is not a manufacturing organisation, it only works with services and offers assistance and financial help to its clients. The production of services needs management in any organisation. APARU works through the system that involves many stages and many people carrying different functions, the applications submitted by the clients through the internet, post or phone enter the system, spend some time being processed by the system and receive a response – negative or positive. Due to the problems the company started to experience, the new objectives of APARU should involve bringing more clarity to their work process, improve their communication with the clients, namely, their ability to provide the clients with information about the status of their application, shorten the terms of processing the applications.
The problems that APARU has to deal with are multiple. The cause of these problems was the company’s success and popularity, the company made itself accessible, began to have many new clients, and because of this its system started to be overloaded with the number of applications for help. More work had to be done by the managers, logically, the costs of the services went higher, and also the process of operation started to take longer time.
As a result, APARU started to lose its main function – the ability to provide quick and inexpensive help to its clients. The description of the system involved into processing the applications, sending them back and requesting more data, giving positive or negative response is not complicated, and all of the workers have routine and clear occupations and tasks, there was no confusion, except that the time they took to process every application was long, also they were troubled by the clients asking for information about their files and the files being impossible to access when they are somewhere inside of the system.
Operations management is crucial for all kinds of organisations, without it their work will soon head to a collapse (Slack, Chambers & Johnson, 2010). To address the problems APARU is facing they would need to carefully follow and examine their structure of work. For example, if everything is alright with the application and it is not put aside for more information – the file has to go through at least seven stages of approval, seven different workers, each of them spends at least ten to sixty minutes to process the file. Besides, the approved files have to wait for the committee of trustees to meet, as they only have meetings once a week.
Besides, the applications that require more information make the process even more chaotic. To my mind, once this part of work is dealt with – the process will go much faster. The applications that require more information should not travel back into the system and take time of people working with other files, it would be best to start a separate branch of operations that would deal with the files that contain ambiguous information. Another problem that APARU workers have to deal with every day is calls from the clients requesting information about their applications, the employees of the company are unable to trace the files and find out their status.
To my mind, the IT crew of APARU should come up with some system to register the route of the files, some system where the information about all the processed application would be contained. The files should be numbered so that their location is easier to find. If the clients were provided information about their applications, the process of requesting more information would improve and speed up, I think.
The role of operations management in the company and its success cannot be underestimated. Many researchers that examined the functions and achievements of the good quality operations management in a company have agreed that it plays a big role in creating and maintaining the company’s competitive advantage (Yudoko, 2012).
Reference List
Operations Management. (2014). MITSloan. Web.
Slack, N., Chambers, S., Johnson, R. (2010). Operations Management. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education. Web.
Slack, N., Chambers, S., Johnson, R., Betts, A. (2009). Operations and Process Management. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education. Web.
Yudoko, G. (2012). Sustainable Operations Strategy: A Conceptual Framework. The 3rd International Conference on Technology and Operations Management (ICTOM) Conference Proceedings, 107-125. Web.