Operations strategy: a decision and evaluation framework

Published on December 6, 2012 Reviewed on October 31, 2016   57 min

A selection of talks on Technology & Operations

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0:00
Welcome to the first lecture on Operations Strategy. My name is Jan Van Meighem and I am a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Our university is located in Evanston, Illinois, near the city of Chicago in the United States. Today, we will talk about the decision and evaluation framework for operations strategy.
0:28
We will start this lecture by explaining what we mean by operations in general and then specifically what is meant by the concept of operations strategy. We will do so by introducing a few examples and during the discussion, also discuss the principles of value maximization and alignment. These two principles are at the core of the framework that we will use for operations strategy. That framework will be useful to guide decisions that managers must make, as well as to evaluate an existing or a new operations strategy.
1:13
When you hear the word, operations, what do you think of? What do people in general think of? What comes to mind first? Perhaps, a picture like this which is taking us back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, on the shop floor of a factory. However, the point that we want to make in this lecture is that operations is much more than what this picture is conveying and for that, it is useful to think about where the word operations comes from? It actually stems from the word "opus" which means in Latin, "work." In other words, operations is about anywhere that work is performed.

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