Guides -- Operations Management
When analyzing a company's operations, you need to conduct two levels of information gathering: primary research on the company itself and secondary analysis about the company and its industry.
The Operations Management Course Guide is primarily designed to walk you through the secondary research steps, from locating a target company to analyzing its internal operations and position in the marketplace.
STEP #1: IDENTIFYING TARGET COMPANIES
The first step is to identify the company you will use for your research project. We recommend three sources: Hoover's Online, Nexis and the paper copy of the Atlanta Book of Lists, which lists leading local companies in a variety of industries.
STEP #2: FINDING INDUSTRY INFORMATION
It is important to understand your company's industry. For the assignment, you will be focusing on how the industry is performing. Other characteristics describing an industry include its market size, growth trends, legal/regulatory issues, technology applications, and other environmental factors. Industry profiles, associations, and government data are core sources to use when analyzing an industry.
STEP #3: FINDING INDUSTRY OPERATIONAL BENCHMARKS
Benchmarking is a continuous process that provides organizations with the opportunity to compare their internal and external best practices to those of other organizations. The resulting differences become targets for process improvement to bridge performance gaps.
Most industry benchmarks and best practices are published by consulting firms and industry associations and are not available for free. In this section are some free sources you can turn to as well as some tips on locating key data in articles.
STEP #4: FINDING COMPANY AND INDUSTRY ARTICLES
Turn to two excellent and different business article databases, Factiva and ABI Inform, to locate company-specific and industry operational practices and strategic challenges.
Look to articles as an efficient outlet for gleaning key intelligence about your company, such as what they do, management's direction, their position in the marketplace, internal and external performance and strategies, challenges and risks.
STEP #5: FINDING DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
While this assignment focuses on an organization's operations, no evaluation is complete without studying the demographics of the organization's location and if possible, the demographics of its customers. Demographics can be as general as the number of people in the city and as specific as the number of people between 34 - 45 who go to restaurants weekly. Demographics also include employment and occupational information.
