Technology and Operations Management: Essay assignment

Your submission should be a process analysis of a problematic business process. Pick a process that affects you personally; it should be a process that you have experience of either managing or using in your work, preferably in your current organization. That process may involve the production of the goods or services your company sells, but it could just as easily be an internal company process, and one that may be driving you crazy.

The paper should have two clearly distinguished sections, of equal weighting. The first should be a structured and analytical evaluation of the current situation (the ‘as is') taken from your company or organization. Credit will be given for using the concepts and approaches discussed in the course. In this section, you are not to try to solve anything. All you need to do is capture the situation as completely, but as succinctly as you can.

The second section should be a discussion that works through a solution or improvement of your own devising, again applying concepts and approaches from the course. You should present your vision of the "should be" process and how it could be implemented.

Any type of operations management problem can be chosen. The problem could be capacity or productivity or quality or timeliness or anything at all. Most of these processes will involve service operations or processes internal to the company

You will be required to submit an individual assignment of a maximum of 4,000 words (including tables, figures and diagrams and excluding appendices, footnotes, and references), weighted at 100%.

My requirements/Guideline for the essay:

The proposition is that the student should apply the learning to a major initiative within operations in their own organizations or one which they knew well. The first five sessions of the course had been taught around five central operational themes: quality, operational strategy, service provision and management, the basis of operational cost and the development of improvement through operational and employee capability.

Please adopt one or some of the five themes above. Please also elaborate or illustrate "muda","bottleneck/critical path", "workflow", "learning and lack of feedback" concepts into the essay.