Weighting:35%Type:Operations design analysis and evaluationFormat:Oral presentation recorded inZoomLength:7 minutes (maximum)
Weighting:35%Type:Operations design analysis and evaluationFormat:Oral presentation recorded inZoomLength:7 minutes (maximum)
Acting as an operations executive, you will critically analyse and evaluate the operations strategy of your current or any other organisation you are familiar with. The aim is to re-think and shape operations strategy to be the central driver towards achieving competitive advantage. You will produce a PowerPoint slideshow and an oral presentation of your operations strategy analysis to communicate your new vision and improvement path to your operations team.
Subject Learning Outcomes
Demonstrate an advanced understanding of operations management principles, frameworks, and contemporary topics.
Critically analyse and evaluate operations management issues.
Clearly, concisely, and credibly communicate operations management knowledge to others.
Task
Some of the biggest names in the service and manufacturing sectors (e.g., Ikea, Amazon, McDonalds, Zara, Apple, Uber) have gained a competitive advantage based on their operations excellence. Of course, if we consider the operations as a significant means of gaining or maintaining competitiveness, then the inverse is also true. The lack of a clear operations strategy, or failure to link it to the overall strategy, could lead to the collapse of a company.
Accordingly, operations executives are invited to step back from their day-to-day routines and re-think how to incorporate multiple perspectives and design operations strategy in order to turn the operations into a source of competitive advantage.
With this in mind, for the first assessment, you are expected to act as an operations executive and critically analyse and evaluate the operations strategy of your current or any other organisation from service, not-for-profit, public, manufacturing, etc. that you are familiar with and produce a PowerPoint slideshow and an oral presentation to your operations team recorded using yourAIB Zoom account.
Your oral presentation needs to address the following requirements:
Provide contextual information relevant to the operations of your selected organisation.
Identify the current stage of operations contribution to the organisation's success using the Hayes and Wheelwright Four Stage model. You need to justify it based on the characteristics of each stage of the model discussed in Week 2.
Critically analyse the current operations strategy of the organisation from the following four perspectives. For this part of the assessment, refer to Week 2:
How to shape operations strategy?
top-down perspective
outside-in perspective
bottom-up perspective
Inside-out perspective
Reflecting on the Hayes and Wheelwright Four Stage model and your organisation, articulate a vision and an improvement path for the operations that elaborates what the operations must eventually become and what contribution it should make to the organisation (doing the right things).
Please note that we do not want you to provide any recommendations onhowthe vision or improvement path can be achieved. This will form part ofassessment 2.
Scholarly resources
To get you started, your librarians have created a 'saved search' for each topic to get the most relevant and recent academic resources from our library that you can use in your assessment. You can narrow the searches further but they should help in finding relevant sources.
Four Vs:4v* OR (variety AND variation AND visibility AND volume)Hayes and Wheelwright:"product-process matrix" OR "P-P matrix" OR (hayes AND wheelwright)Operations Strategy:"operations strategy"You may also like to review some of the leading journals in the field:Decision Analysis,Decision Science,Journal of Operations Management,International Journal of Operations and Production Management,Production and Operations ManagementandManufacturing and Service Operations Management.
Requirements
Prepare your presentation using PowerPoint (Office 365).
You are recommended to use a maximum of 9 slides, inclusive of Title and References slidesIf you have used Generative AI in the creation of your presentation, you must clearly state this within your slides or additional slide(s) seeAIB Style Guide Section 4: Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) for details
Record your presentation using yourAIB Zoom accountmaximum 7 minutes (presentation will not be marked after 7 minutes)
You must record with the Powerpoint slides in presenter mode and you must present to the camera and be in the video throughout your presentation.
youmust use Zoom; otherwise,you will receive a 0% gradeSeeAIB Style Guide: 7.7 Oral presentationsbefore you submit for resources on how to record your presentation using AIB Zoom and how to deliver an effective presentation, including how to cite and reference slides and examples.
Submit your presentation as both:
a shareable Zoom link in the online text box
a PowerPoint file (.pptx) with References and Generative AI declaration (if GenAI was used)
This assessment requires you to use a minimum ofsix (6)credible academic sources in addition to your textbook. You may also use the current company, industry, government and media sources to support your statements, but these will NOT count toward the minimum required credible academic sources for your assessment. Most web-based sources are not sufficiently rigorous and credible for academic assessments and will NOT count toward the minimum required credible academic sources for your assessment. For further guidance, refer toScholarly, academic & peer-reviewed journals.
You must appropriately acknowledge all sources of information in your assessment following theAIB Style Guide. This includes the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT. See relevant sections on 'Academic Integrity', 'Generative Artificial Intelligence' and 'Referencing' in theAIB Style Guide.
Grading criteria and feedback
Your assessment will be marked according to theAssessment 1 rubric (.pdf).
