Your Career in Operations

<p>I've invested the vast majority of my long career in operations. I find it fascinating.</p><p>Regardless of industry, operations includes the technologies, processes, materials, and procedures that delivering value on each order involves. Many would look at those words and see no similarities between making mac and cheese for millions of consumers and making aerospace parts for a limited number of engines.</p><p>Yet my transition from operations of the first to the second was fast and easier than you might imagine.</p><p>I am NOT a technologist. Making frozen prepared foods I worked with food scientists. Making aerospace parts I worked with metallurgists and ceramicists.</p><p>I AM a business and operations expert. Both food and aerospace industries, and I could give many more examples, must obtain and keep customers, must know what materials are needed when, what critical steps are involved in converting those materials to the end product sold to the customer, and must comply with regulations while delivering cost effective quality reliably.</p><p>The choreography of information, materials, equipment and decisions is one giant puzzle to be solved. The production system is what solves that puzzle.</p><p>Many manufacturing businesses see the complications and distinctions that can make their operations difficult. The better ones focus on the similarities, simplifications, and apply lessons from everyone in their improvement processes.</p><p>Both leaders and shop floor employees of the majority of, for example, tool and die companies believe that they are job shops, that every order is unique, and that because of those two facts there is no production system that makes delivery times reliable. Internal scheduling for them is one reaction to the last customer call after another.</p><p>That thinking is simply wrong, and contributed heavily to outsourcing tool and die production to cheap labor markets.</p><p>While the intricate details of the metal removed from the block of steel to create the specific shape requir