Harley's Automotive Services, Minot North Dakota

The purpose of the operations management paper is for you to experience the struggles and joys a business manager or owner experiences when assessing their operations. Researching and writing this paper will also provide you with some consulting experience.

You will use what you have learned in this course AND research you perform to provide a detailed analysis of what a small business manager or owner should do to improve its operations using terms and concepts learned in this course through the textbook, course material, and assignments.

For this assignment you are to do the following:

• Identify and select an existing business that you are very familiar with the inner operations. I suggest you visit a real business or use a business that you work at or volunteer at and research how they conduct operations. It would be best to set up a meeting with the manager or owner to see their operations and discuss it with them. Most small business managers and owners are thrilled to have the consultation and a new set of eyes to make suggestions for their business. If you cannot actually visit the business ensure to research about it using the Internet.
• Based on your research and your familiarity with the business you are to use the textbook AND research to provide three ORIGINAL operations management suggestions to improve the business. Each suggestion should be based on an operations management concept described in the textbook. Do not be vague, be very specific. Collect data. Operations management is QUANTITATIVE. This is not an op-ed or an opinion-based paper, so it should not be based on your thoughts or simple ideas, your suggestions should be grounded in research.

You are to write the paper as if you are a consultant providing an operations management research proposal to a business client. To do this effectively you must at a minimum do the following:

• Define the operations management concept you are addressing using the definition from the book (i.e. value chain management, measuring performance, facility design, supply chain design, scheduling, sequencing, process design, capacity management, forecasting, managing inventories, demand planning, scheduling, etc).
• Describe what the business is currently doing in this area of operations and why what they are currently doing is ineffective or inefficient.
• Use academic or business sources to come up with operations solutions for the business. Based on what you find in your research of these sources, describe a suggestion for the business to implement to improve their operations in each of the three areas you have chosen.
• Use at least one formula from the course to demonstrate how it would be utilized with your operations management suggestion for the organization. You can use whichever formula from the book you want (for example, utilization rate or capacity formula). If you are using an actual business, you can plug their numbers that they give you into the formula, you can visit the business and based on observations you can use numbers you come up with or you can make up numbers based on research of the business.
• For this paper, please do not wait until the last minute. It cannot be rushed and done effectively and your grade will reflect this if you rush the research paper.
  • Please ensure to read ALL textbook chapters, assignment instructions and review the attached Operations Management Paper Rubric prior to completing this assignment.