Hi, I’m Chris West and I have created this Blogging site to share ideas on Small Business Operations with like minded people.

Operations Management is often regarded as being mainly applicable to large businesses and large public sector organisations. Yet the techniques and approaches in operations management are applicable to small businesses. As Operations Management can make or break a business, it’s important that anyone who owns, manages or works in a small businesses has an appropriate understanding of how operations can be fine tuned to increase the efficiency and profitability of a business or just to survive!

At the same time relating Operations Management to small businesses can help Business Studies Students rapidly gain an understanding of Operations Management. This happens because in small businesses we can apply key operations management principles to situations which are often more visible or less complicated than that of large organisations.

The main drivers of success in a business are FINANCE and OPERATIONS. With FINANCE it’s about being able to fund the business in the first place and then achieving sufficient sales to enable positive cash flow and profits. OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT is about creating and delivering the products and services that are to be sold by our business.

 

Operations Management covers a number of key areas:

• THE ROLE OF OPERATIONS IN DELIVERING, SUPPORTING AND DRIVING BUSINESS STRATEGY
• THE DESIGN OF PROCESSES, OPERATIONS, THE SUPPLY NETWORK AND HOW THIS CONTRIBUTES TO THE DESIGN OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
• THE PLANNING OF OPERATIONS
• THE IMPROVEMENT OF OPERATIONS

and in each of these areas we can call on a wide range of approaches and techniques:

If you run a small business it is likely that you are using a selection of these approaches, probably as  a natural way of life within a business.

My experience in starting and running three small businesses in different contexts was that if we got our operations right we were successful. I have also witnessed the opposite.

The purpose of this blogging site is to share and discuss the application of particular operations management approaches to different small business situations.

My next blog will look at approaches to forecasting demand for our products and services and how we can manage our capacity to serve our customers.

In the meantime I welcome comments about the value of doing this and suggestions for other operations management topics that we should discuss.

Thank you