Ops_571_Week_One

Design a Flowchart for a Process Marie Whitney Harding Operations Management 571 August 29, 2011 Professor Michael Marticek Design a Flowchart of a Process A process within an organization is a series of related transactions the flows logically and takes inputs and transforms them into outputs. If the series are a true process, the outputs will have a greater value than the original inputs. My 14-year old son and I are both night people. We like to stay up late at night and sleep late in the morning. However, this interferes with work and school. I have identified a process and designed a flowchart to review driving my son to school in the morning. The flowchart will help to identify the time it takes to for him to wake up, shower, dress, and drive him to school. It will help to identify the bottleneck in the process and the areas to improve. Factors Affecting Process Design Decisions Many factors can affect a process design decision. Demand, flexibility, degree of automation, quality level or customer contact are factors that operations managers may need to consider when designing a process. Items that can affect driving my son to school on time are: * School traffic * Weather * Do I need have cash for lunch' * Do I need to put gas in the car' * Is he going to eat breakfast at home' Currently the alarm is set for 5:30 and school starts for him at 7:26. Steps in the process may affect the amount of time the process takes is: * Taking too long getting up. * Taking too long in the shower. * Not making sure he had clean clothes to wear. Identified Metric The metric of choice to evaluate the process is time. Cycle time is defined as the average time between completions of successive units in a repetitive process. The metric will allow the measurement of the process of driving my son to school by collecting data on how much time it takes in the morning to get him ready. Week 1, Tuesday: 1 hour, 35 minutes Week 1, Wednesday: 1 hour, 15 minutes Week 1, Thursday: 1 hour, 2 minutes Week 1, Friday: 1 hour, 25 minutes Flowchart Conclusion Process design and management is a tool that operations managers and process engineers use to evaluate how a process works, how efficient a process is, and where the issues arise within the process. Bottlenecks, blocks, starving, and buffering are examples of issues that can affect the process design. A flowchart can assist in establishing the process design and identifying where the issues occur in the process. References Chase, R.B., Jacobs, F.R., & Aquilano, N.J. (2006). Operations management for competitive advantage (11th ed.). New York, New York: McGraw Hill/Irwin. Blake, D. (2008, November 13). Major factors affecting process design decisions. Retrieved from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1188168/major_factors_affecting_process_design.html'cat=3