Operations management Applications


I want you to begin noticing how the success of a company is influenced by operational decisions, and be able to recognize these operational decisions in current news stories. Keep in mind that only ONE person may post on a given news story (this means if the same story/ event, etc. appears in multiple news outlets, you may not post after another person has posted the same story.)  For examples of the type of article that is expected for this assignment, please see the articles posted within Unit 7 (OM applications to support company strategy/ goals and OM Applications related to COVID-19 and Healthcare in General).

In your ORIGINAL POST, you need to provide a link to an interesting RECENT (since the beginning of January 2022) news article in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, or other mainstream newspaper or business magazine (i.e. this does NOT mean blog posts or press releases, but rather mainstream news outlets, including your local city newspaper, i.e. Palm Beach Post, Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald, for those in South Florida), related to applications of operations management.   In your ORIGINAL post you should include the following:

CREATE a new thread with the first line being the title of the article, in BOLD.

1) Title of article – NOTE: This article must be DIFFERENT from any other article already posted by your classmates and also different in topic (i.e. same news, but different article). A duplicate article will not receive credit. To make sure someone doesn’t post the same article while you are preparing your post, I highly suggest you post responses to items 1, 2, 3 and 3A, and then reply to your first post with a response to items 4, 5, and 6 within three days.  

2) Source of the article

3) Hyper link to the article so other students can click on the link and view the article (paste the link into the CANVAS Discussion Forum, then highlight the link, click on the chain link in the tools bar, and paste the link again into the address box, and submit).

3A) Predominant OM Topic illustrated in the article (no explanation here – you will do that in 5) – this is particularly important for those articles relating to COVID-19, since there are so many articles in the news now, I don’t want everyone repeating the same concept but with different articles.  See previous page in this module for more direction.

4) Provide a brief summary of the article (5 – 6 sentences). Do NOT plagiarize from a subsection of the article.  

5) Explain how it relates to operations management, i.e. what specific concept/ decision of operations management (i.e. inventory management, supply chain management, product design, capacity constraints, etc.) is illustrated in the article, and how does the article illustrate how these decisions affect the performance of the firm. 

6) Finally, explain what lessons or concepts this article helped you understand, or what take-aways you can give to other students based on the article.

I will be paying particular attention to the relevance of the article to operations management (i.e. it directly relates to the topic), as well as your explanation about HOW it relates to a specific area of operations management.  I will also look for how well you have briefly summarized the article without copying parts of the article.