Chapter 8: Operations Management and Supply Chain

1. Define the term operations management.
Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services. Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.

2. Explain operations management's role in business.
The scope of the operations management ranges across the organisation and includes many interrelated activities, such as forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, managing inventories, assuring quality, motivating employees, deciding where to locate facilities and more. To be effective, the operations manager must have access to real-time, accurate data to support their decisions. Below is an example of an airline companies operations managements activities:
- Forecasting - seats, weather and landing conditions.
- Capacity planning - maintaining cash flow and increase revenue.
- Scheduling - airline operates on tight schedules that must be maintained including flights, pilots, flight attendants, ground crews, baggage handlers and routine maintenance.
- Management inventory - inventory of such items as foods, beverages, first-aid equipment, in-flight magazines, pillows, blankets and life jackets.
- Assuring quality - quality is indispensable in an airline where safety is the highest priority.
- Motivating and training employees - employees must be highly trained and continually motivated.
- Locating facilities - key questions facing airlines include which cities to offer services, where to host maintenance facilities and where to locate major and minor hubs.

3. Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology.
Managers can use information technology to heavily influence operations management decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality and customer satisfaction. One of the great benefits of IT on operations management is in making operational decisions because operation managers exerts considerable influence over the degree to which the goals and objectives of the organisation are realised.
However there are some problems that operations managers face, including: disparate systems in different business units hamper the flow of information and material between operations often times inflating costs and inventories, and aging and inconsistent technology platforms lead to increasing IT maintenance and support costs.

4. Explain supply chain management and its role in a business.
Supply chain management involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. It is a network of organizations and facilities that transforms raw materials into products delivered to customers. Customers order from retailers, who in turn order from distributors, who in turn order from manufacturers, who in turn order from suppliers. The supply chain also includes transportation companies, warehouses, and inventories and some means for transmitting messages and information among the organizations involved.

5. List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain.
The five components of a typical supply chain are:
1. Plan - A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less, and delivers high quality and value to customers.
2. Source - Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must also develop a set of pricing, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationship.
3. Make - This is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
4. Deliver - This step is commonly referred to as logistics. Logistics is the set of processes that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers. During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfill the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.
5. Return - This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

6. Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.
Information Technology's primary role in supply chain management is creating the integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within a firm - such as marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing and distribution - and between firms, which allow the smooth, synchronized flow of both information and product between customers, suppliers and transportation providers across the supply chain. Information Technology integrates planning, decision making process, business operating processes and information sharing for business performance management.
There are 4 factors that drive the supply chain management:
1. Visibility - supply chain visibility is the ability to view all areas up and down the supply chain.
2. Competition - supply chain planning (SCP) software uses advanced mathematical algorithms to improve the flow and efficiency of the supply chain, and supply chain execution (SCE) software - automates the different steps and stages of the supply chain.
3. Speed - competition often equates to speed. Advances in IT are delivering this speed. Factors fostering speed include pleasing customers, need for reducing inventory and strategic planning requirements.
4. Consumer behaviour - companies can respond faster and more effectively to consumer demands through supply chain enhances. Demand planning software generates demand forecasts using statistical tools and forecasting techniques.

Chapter 7: Networks and Wireless

1. Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.
The business benefits of

2. Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP.
The business benefit of VoIP (Voice over IP) is that it allows the internet to carry voice in digital format, therefore call costs will dramatically decrease as the international calls are now internet connections. It saves money in three ways; VoIP runs over the existing computer network, calls over the internet do not attract Telecommunication charges, and customers can port their numbers between carriers. However businesses still need to have at least one normal PSTN lines are VoIP is susceptible to power failure, viruses and other threats.

3. Describe LANs and WANs.
LAN - Local area networks connect computers that reside in a single geographic location on the premises of the company that operates the LAN.
WAN - Wide area networks that connect computers at different geographical sites.

4. Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.
RFID stands for radio frequency identification. They are tags that use radio waves to transmit data. They are heavily used in Inventory tracking, and should eventually replace barcodes. Passive radio frequency identification uses no internal power and can pick up the very faint signal from an antenna. An active radio frequency identification has power and transmits much stronger and accurate data. It can power up just enough to transmit data back to antenna. It can also store small amounts of EPROM data. They can be mass produced at a very low cost

5. Identify the advantages and disadvantages of deploying mobile technology.
Advantages

Chapter 6: Databases and Data Warehouses

1. List, describe and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.
- Accuracy
- Completeness
- Consistency
- Uniqueness - Timeliness

2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.
A database is a collection of information that is organised so that it can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. Computer databases typically contain aggregations of data records or files, such as sale transactions, product catalogs and inventories, and customer profiles. An example of a database is Microsoft Access.

A database management system is a set of computer programs that controls the creation, maintenance, and the use of a database. It allows organisations to place control of database development in the hands of database administrators and other specialists. A database management system is a system software package that helps the use of integrated collection of data records and files known as databases. It allows different user application programs to easily access the same databases.

3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.
Databases have many advantages when used by an organisation. These are listed below:
- Data Security - Keeping the organisation's data safe from theft, modification and/or destruction.
- Data Integrity - Data must meet constraints (e.g. student grade point average cannot be negative)
- Data Independence - Applications and data are independent of one another. Applications and data are not linked to each other, meaning that applications are able to access the same data.
- Increased flexibility - should be able to handle changes quickly and easily.
- Increased scalability and performance - a database must scale to meet increased demand, while maintaining acceptable performance levels. Scalability refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands and performance measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction.
- Reduced information redundancy
- Increased information integrity (quality)
- Increased information security - information is an organisational asset and must be protected. Databases offer several security features including: password (provides authentication of the user), access level (determines who has access to the different types of information) and access control (determines types of user access, such as read-only access).

4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.
A relational database is a collection of tables from which data can be accessed in many different ways without having to reorganize the database tables. That is, once relationships are created, tables can talk to each other. We can link (relate) the tables to find: which doctors are seeing a patient, which students are in which class and which item is selling the most on Friday's. Relational databases work on unique records, if you don't have unique records, your database can't tell which record you may be referring to. To ensure that each record is unique in each table, we can set one field to be a primary key field. A primary key field is a field that will contain no duplicates and no blank values.

5. Describe the benefits of a data driven website.
A data driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database. The customer enters the search criteria in the website. The database runs a query on the search criteria. Some of these advantages include: development, content management, future expandability, minimising human error, cutting production and update costs, more efficient and improved stability.

6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organisation.
Data warehouse is a logical collection of information, gathered from many different operational databases, that supports business analysis activities and decisions-making tasks. The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organisation into a single repository for decision-making purposes.

Chapter 5: Enterprise Architectures

1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?
Information architecture - identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

Information infrastructure - Communications networks and associated software that supports interaction amongst people and organisations. Its the computers and communications lines underlying critical services that society has come to depend on: financial networks, the power grid, transportation, emergency services, government services. It includes the internet and telecommunication networks.

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.
An organisation can implement a solid information architecture by having a backup and recovery strategy. The three primary areas of information architecture are backup and recovery, disaster recovery and information security. With these three primary areas strong then a solid information architecture.

3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.
Reliability - High accuracy (low accuracy puts the organisation at risk).

Scalability - systems ability to meet growth requirements, involves capacity planning.

Flexibility - able to meet changing business demands. Might involve multinational challenges.

Availability - High availability 99.999% uptime. Ensures

business continuity.

Performance - How quickly a system performs a certain task. Growing pressure on systems to be faster.

4. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture.
The business value in deploying a service oriented architecture is that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It also allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion and means that a business can respond more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market-conditions.

5. What is an event?
An event is the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology, they detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. Pioneered by telecommunication and financial services companies, this involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter.

6. What is a service?

A service can be a business task, such as checking a potential customer's credit rating only opening a new account. Services are 'like' software products. They are more like software products than they are coding projects.

7. What emerging technologies can companies use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?
Virtualisation is a framwork of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. It is a way of increasing physical resources to maximise in the investment in hardware. VM customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines with VMware and vSphere.

Grid computing is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage, and network resources, coordicated to deliver improved performance, higher quality of service, better utilisation, and easier access to data. Used by scientific, e-Commerce, technical or engineering projects that require many processing cycles to complete a job.