Week 6 — Making the Product: Operations, Quality & Information Systems

Welcome to your Week 6 Start Here page.

Why this matters

Whether you run a hospital kitchen or a coffee cart of your own, you will need to find the step that slows the work, build quality in, and keep your information safe.

In plain language

Every business has to make something, whether it is a loaf of bread, a bus ride, or a cup of coffee. Operations management (the work of running the process that turns materials and work into what a business sells) is how that making gets planned and improved. This week you will find the one slow step that limits how much a business can make, which is called the bottleneck (the slowest step in a process). You will also see how firms build quality (how well a product meets what customers need) into every step instead of checking it at the end. Last, you will learn how a small business keeps its information safe.

• Already covered: Week 5, What the Business Owes, asked what a business owes the people its choices touch.
• This week: operations, the bottleneck and capacity, quality, and information security.
• How they connect: a new unit begins on making the product and selling it.
• Where we're going next: Week 7, Who Buys and at What Price.

Focus

How does a business make what it sells, and what limits how much it can make?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] sort a production process by type
• [ ] find a process's bottleneck and compute its capacity
• [ ] name the approaches that build quality in
• [ ] match common data threats to basic protections

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 6 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Business Case Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: find the cart's bottleneck and its capacity with one machine and with two.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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