Operational and functional design management

Operational design

The discipline of Operations Management examines how work is accomplished, that is, how an organization transforms inputs into output.

Normally we don't think about how some organization manufactures its product or delivers its service, but if an airline has misplaced your luggage with the suit you needed tomorrow or if you stood in line for what seemed like hours to pay a bill, then you probably mumbled to yourself, “Why can't they get it right?”

some organization may have impressed you at the speed of service you received, such as Avis employees helping your family make a flight whose departure time you misread or a bank approving a loan in 24 hours. Perhaps you wondered how they designed the business operation to execute so well.

Operational design addresses how inputs are transformed into the organization's products.

In other words, operation design focuses upon value added transformations.

Every operation is composed of three design elements: 1) processes or procedures,

2) equipment and facilities, and 3) people.

People use the equipment following some set of procedures to transform an input into an output.

The overall transformation of inputs into an organization's product will occur through multiple process steps.

Each process step is accomplished at a work station or work center.

A work station may be identified by a specific set of equipment or facilities, staffed by certain employees.

In factories there may be hundreds of work stations. These work stations will fall into logical groupings called operating units.

Within an operating unit some readily

identifiable portion of the total transformation process takes place. This may be the R&D department in a high tech company or the packaging plant in a bakery.

There are various types of transformations:

1. In an oil refinery, oil is chemically transformed into gasoline.

2.A lumber mill physically transforms trees into lumber.

3.A train transports freight and passengers.

• Multiple types of transformations could be performed, such as a steel mill which has both physical and chemical transformations.

EXAMPLES• Transformations in service operations may be more

difficult to identify. In a movie theater, patrons undergo an entertainment transformation.

• In a university, students learn and are thus transformed.

• Note that in the movie theater and university transformation activities, the input being transformed, i.e., the customer, is also an active participant in performing the transformation.

What determines the operational system a firm might use?

Some factors are endogenous to the firm. For example, the company may have employees with a certain skill set or it may have some key asset that it can leverage.

Other factors are exogenous to the firm. For

example, the demand for the product or service may peak and ebb considerably, and the product may be very perishable.

The combination of these factors along with the

exact specification of the product will lead toward one operational design/system.

While there is no one best at operational design/system for a product area, a good operational design must have congruence among the three design elements.

That is, the three elements must fit together for the design to work:

We would not use employees with a grade school education to operate sophisticated machinery.

If we have highly talented people, we want the equipment and the process to make the best use of all their talents.

The three elements:

1) processes or procedures, 2) equipment and facilities, and 3) people.

There is no one right way to design an operation to produce some product. If we look at operations we encounter every day, we see countless operational

designs in companies that produce similar products.

For example, compare: • a cafeteria to a family restaurant • a specialty store to a discount warehouse store • a microbrewery to a mass brewery.

Their products are similar - food, retail services, and beer, respectively - yet the mix of people, processes, and equipment differs dramatically. Even if we look at hamburger fast food restaurants, we will find major differences in operational designs.

Sum up:

Operations management is an area of business that is concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient and effective.

It is the management of resources, the distribution of goods and services to customers, and the analysis of queue systems.

Break time 12mins

Functional design management

Look at what you’ve made.

Beautiful, isn’t it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it,

but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

At the heart of every piece of practical design, whether it be a website, product package, office building, manufacturing system, piece of furniture, software interface, book cover, tool, or anything else, there is a function, a task the item is expected to perform.

Most functions can be achieved in a variety of ways, but there are some basic elements a designer needs to take into account to create a product that best fulfills its intended function.

Functional designIn practice designer needs to know all the

principle functions; these activities are called conceptual or functional design.

They consist to design those technical solutions or to choice ones which already exist with the correct dimensioning.

Functional design doesn’t require any geometric of CAD (computing assisted design) model.

All that’s needed is:

Crucial decisions that engage the potential life costs and product performances

It should be executed by the best specialists of the product.

functional design, the process of responding to the needs or desires of the people who will use an item in a way that allows their needs or desires to be met.

Functional design is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, it describes products that work well to perform their assigned tasks; as a process, functional design is a set of practices guided by the principles that produce that positive outcome.

(Functional design is also a computer modeling technique, but that’s not what we’re discussing here.)

1. Consider the product’s goal.

Consider the screwdriver. The goal of a screwdriver is pretty straight-forward: to drive screws. Although there’s certainly a lot of room for innovation in screwdriver design — there are screwdrivers with more ergonomic handles, ratchet-assemblies, magnetic tips, and exchangeable heads — ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws

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Now, consider a website like Amazon.com. What is the goal of Amazon’s website? Amazon has a lot of different uses, some intended by Amazon and its designers and some not intended — you can look up reviews, compare product prices while you’re in a store considering a purchase, promote your brand by leaving lots of reviews, scam shoppers by creating fake storefronts, collect images of book covers for a school project, search book text for half-remembered quotes, and so on.

But none of those are the reason the site was built. For the folks at Amazon, the website has one purpose: to sell stuff. All the features that allow those other uses were put in place as ways to sell more products. (And it seems to be working!)

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2. Consider who will be using it.

• Perhaps the single most important consideration in the design process — and the one most often forgotten — is the intended audience for the product.

• What works perfectly well for one user might be completely dysfunctional for another. And if the hoped-for users fall more into the second category than the first, you’ve got a problem.

Think about the way your parents or grandparents use their computers. Anyone with a bit of tech-savviness has probably fielded dozens of "tech support" calls from family members who are simply baffled by things like adding an email account to their email program, downloading family pictures from the Web, or dealing with a too-full hard drive.

3. Consider what your audience intends to do with it.

As we saw in the case of Amazon.com, there are a lot of ways that users use a product besides those that directly fulfill the product’s main goal. In fact, every user comes to a product with his or her own intention — and they are rarely the goals that designers have in mind.

For example, nobody in the history of humankind has ever wanted to record what was on channel Three between 9 pm and 10pm on Thursday the 27th — yet for years that was how VCR designers insisted we program our VCRs. No surprise, then, that few people programmed their VCRs.

4. Is it clear how to use it? The best design, as often said, "speaks for itself". It is

immediately clear — at least to its target audience(s) — what a product does and how to use it. Clarity is key to functional design. Probably one of the best-designed objects in the world is the ball. With minimal instruction even infants can use it!

5. How does your user know its working?• How often do you double-check to see that your alarm clock

is set to go off, and at the right time, before you can relax and go to sleep? Or maybe you’ve run into this problem: you hit "Program" on your CD player (assuming you still have one) and key in the tracks you want to hear, but aren’t sure whether to hit "Program" again or just hit "Play" — and if you hit the wrong one, whether your program will be lost and you’ll have to re-do it.

6. Is it engaging to your users?

One of the great products of recent years, at least in terms of engagement, is the Blackberry. Blackberry owners can’t stop fiddling with their devices — they check their email, flick the trackball around, check email again, send a text, scroll around the home screen, and then do it all over again. And again.

It’s no accident it’s earned the nickname "Crackberry.”

Good design draws users in, whether through visual appeal, feel, ease of use, or sheer amazement. Anyone who has ever picked up a well-made hand tool and felt the desire to build something has experienced this — the tool just feels right.

7. How does it handle mistakes?

How often have you visited a web page, realized it didn’t have the information you were looking for, clicked the "Back" button, and ended up on the same page again?

You made a mistake, to be sure — you clicked the wrong link — but that happens. It was the designer, though, who decided to make your mistake difficult to undo. Good design takes into account the possibility that users make mistakes.

End!!!