Ops management is broken down into 3 parts. You are designing, managing, and improving a set of activities that creates products and services and delivers them to customers.
Whenever starting a new position or responsibility, don’t feel overwhelmed. Keep calm, and map the process. Look for complexity and simplify.
Lead Time: The time between a request and the delivery of your product to the customer
Throughput: The amount of a product a business can create within a period of time
Cycle Time: The total amount of time from the beginning to the end of the process
Capacity: Maximum output from a process, measured in units per unit of time
Efficiency: A business’ performance standard. All processes are leveraging resources in the most optimal way
Bottleneck: A process in a linked chain that is slow, reducing the capacity of the whole
Is your lemonade stand running efficiently? Let’s cheek out your process and see how it’s doing.
Filling the pitcher happens every 5 cups. Depending on your demand you could constantly be making 5 cups at a time in a batch to meet demand.
Unless you were reducing a cycle time, or removing a bottleneck, each batch would take 12 minutes and 10 seconds. Unless you hire more people, that is your max capacity.
Now, if you usually produce 5 batches an hour (25 cups/hour), you can then figure your capacity utilization. If you only produced 17 cups this hour your capacity utilization would be 17/25 = 68%.
This is a simple example, but the principle can apply anywhere. Keep calm, analyze the process, find ways to improve, and then do it.