Operations Management For Dummies

Chapter 5

Designing Your Process to Match Your Product or Service

In This Chapter

Classifying processes and balancing costs

Creating successful customer interfaces and back-office operations

Deciding between making to stock and making to order

Using certain design techniques for specific products

When you’re designing processes to create a product or deliver your services, a good relationship between process and product makes your job as an operations manager easier. In other words, every aspect of a manufacturing process depends on the product you’re trying to create, and process design is a fundamental aspect of product development. Your product, whether it’s a widget or a service, drives process design, and your processes ultimately determine your costs and profit margins.

In this chapter, we classify processes along four dimensions and describe a concrete method for evaluating the costs associated with process design choices. We also explore the anatomy of manufacturing and service operations with a focus on how to design and exploit a process to get the most productivity out ...