GROUP PROJECT- OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

The group project is one of the most important learning tools of the course.

For the project, each group shall identify a business organization. The particular business
organisation shall be identified by the group itself on the basis of group consensus. No two
groups can select same business organization.

The choice of business organisation is flexible and can be a manufacturing or service

organisation from any industry of interest. Few examples can be a small or medium scale
manufacturing unit, restaurant, bank, school, e- commerce company etc. It is suggested that
accessibility, geographical proximity and logistics with regards to field visits should be
taken into account in selecting the business organisation.

The objective of the group project is to study in detail the operations being performed in
the selected business organization and apply the principles, methods, tools and techniques
of operations management for process improvement in order achieve better business
performance.

Group project shall address the following topics vis-à-vis the selected business
organization:

Part-A:
1. Competitive strategy of the selected business organization
 Differentiation
 Multi cuisine
 Replenishment
 Manpower
 Specialized Chef

2. Role of operations in achieving competitive strategy

 Service time
 Lead time
 Stock keeping
 Bill processing(cash/credit)
 Order processing
 Maintenance
 Standards set and followed or maintained

3. Various strategic, planning and operational decisions taken under operations

function
 Strategic-targeting, seating capacity, facility layout, ambience,
 Tactical-choosing suppliers, vendors, no of waiters , desired skill set ,code
of conduct
 Operational-day to day decision ,supply fulfillment ,inventory record
keeping, staff availability weekly and at weekend
 4. Competitive priorities and current capabilities of the operations function; gaps if
any between them; order winners and order qualifiers
 Capacity and flexibility

Part-B: Based on Part-A, each group shall undertake the following:

1. Identify the quality problems faced by operations in the selected business

organization
2. Identify at least four critical processes which presents opportunities for process
improvement;
3. Define the scope or boundaries of the selected processes
4. Document the selected processes. It includes a) documenting the process inputs,
outputs, suppliers (internal or external) and customers (internal or external) b)
documenting the different steps in the process using process flow charts or process
charts
5. Define performance measures / metrics for the selected process.
6. Utilize various data analysis tools to identify causes of the quality problems like
Checklists; Histograms and Bar charts; Pareto charts; Scatter diagrams; Cause-
and-effect diagrams; Statistical Process Control (SPC) Charts. Although use of
tools will depend on the context of the problem being studied, it is expected that
each group will employ SPC charts for all the selected process.
7. Evaluate performance of each selected process and identify gaps between actual
and desired performance of the process.
8. Generate justifiable ideas and provide recommendations for process
improvements. Recommendations may include suggestions to remove causes of
quality problems or redesigning the steps in the selected processes.

Final Project Report Format

The final report has to be prepared and submitted in the format given below:

Executive Summary
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Tables
List of Figures

i. Introduction to the study

ii. Various deliverables of the group project as mentioned above in Part-A and Part-B

References

Ground Rules

 All documents created as part of group project should be precise, to the point and rich
in content.
 Grading of the report will be done on the strength of the content, analysis and
explanation therein.

 Please incorporate diagrams wherever required.

 All groups to submit hard copy of the project report as per the submission deadline

Presentation

 Each presentation will be of 15 minutes with 10 minutes given to the group to highlight
the key findings and 5 minutes for open discussion with the students.