The Life of an Operations Manager Made Simple With PAZO
Do you think you’re busy? If yes, then the chances are quite high that you might’ve not met an operations manager! Now, before delving deeper into the topic, let us see what is operations management? Operations management is defined as the area of management which is concerned with the controlling and designing of the production process and redesigning all business operations in the development of services and goods. Most commonly, operations managers have a wide gamut of everyday tasks which they’re assigned to but that can even vary depending on the company and niche where they are working.
To begin with, one of the main chores/tasks of anyone in operations management department is to analyze and monitor current operations and devise numerous ingenious strategies for improvement in a constant way. Operations managers play a pivotal role in any company whether they are a private business, government-controlled or a non-profit.
In an organization, it’s an operations manager’s job to oversee the entirety of the company and to make sure everything is running clutter free. As you’d have understood by now, operations management is a constantly changing job, so there’s always a huge room for improvement! In this blog, we will have a broader look into the life of an operations manager, what’s there the everyday activities, how their problems can be resolved, and more.
That’s how a typical day of an operations manager looks like:
- 09:30 AM: A short 15–20 minutes group meeting with the team to understand the passed-by day and plan for the upcoming/next day(s).
- 11:00 AM: Going through the everyday report(s) and analyze any possible backlogs, failure, and comments from different organization managers like quality and finance.
- 12.15 PM: Daily understanding of the availability of man and machine, thus executing plans for handling and getting support from the Human Resource (departments may vary) and the engineering department while supporting them back with planning.
- Post-Lunch: Getting to know the meetings lined up for the day from company/personal secretary. An operations manager is sure to have nothing less than 4–5 meetings daily lined up with the chairman, CEO, clients, CFO, QA managers, and heads, etc… and, they can not afford to miss any!
- 4.30 PM: Operations managers need their monthly and annual plans ready- so, in those moments when they don’t have any meetings or reviews, they work rigorously to complete those tasks, making presentations for either the person who has to do that job, in order to complete the task of the company or for the board of directors, for their approval on certain things (with elaborated logic and figures and facts) or submission of reports on completed tasks.
- Miscellaneous Tasks: And, the best thing — every day has its own set of problems & situations. It’s like walking into a new job every single day! Getting to solve problems on a regular basis… because every problem is unique.
Trends in Operations Management, Problems Faced & Their Remedies:
1. Internal Communications
As the millennial generation is continuing to occupy the major portion of today’s workforce, and unemployment stats are at their historical lows, all business leaders should continue to prioritize their developing strategies for employee engagement and retention. Because we all know that satisfied employees work harder and invest more in your company.
Promoting transparent internal communication is one surefire method that will prove effective for retaining millennial employees. Having a facilitating one-to-one communication feature can provide the following benefits for your workplace:
- Improve processes and outcomes, regardless of your industry, so deadlines are met and project completion can happen sooner.
- Boost workplace morale.
- Encourage and increase employee collaboration. When great minds come together, and colleagues are able to voice and action ideas more effectively, this yields optimal results on any project.
Remedy: Nothing can permanently replace a good internal communication structure, but we know it is difficult to achieve sometimes. People might say you can go and ask your team directly about the feedback but it demands loads of time which operations managers can’t spare any. So, what you can do is employ a mobile application where you can send instant messages to any department and can receive priority-based notifications if any action has been taken for a particular issue or snag!
With this, an operations manager can save a considerable amount of their time and energy and utilize it to places which demands urgency. With a mobile application that has a communication feature, an operations manager can prioritize their tasks and can delegate, if required.
2. Automating Every Day Operational Activities
By automating most of the processes in your organization you can save money and boost efficiency in operational activities. With automation, a real-time issue can be easily escalated to the higher department (if required) so that the right personnel can take required actions for the same and resolve it immediately. For example, in the retail industry approval management, task assignments, and issue resolutions are a handful of examples of business which are dependent on technology.
All these processes can be automated via software and an Ops Manager can focus their valuable time on training staff. Automation goes beyond your company’s digital presence and with the ever-increasing competition, automation has become an inseparable part and parcel of businesses.
P.S. In any organization you must have seen an increase in the use of automatic scheduling and delivery of targeted internal media campaigns, work schedule notifications, and read-receipt functions in company’s one-to-one and group messaging all of which add automatic convenience to daily operational processes.
Remedy: What you can do is talk with your team and find a mobile app or an online software which has automation feature in it. But why? So you won’t have to perform repetitive tasks! Its need to say time is money and no one should waste it because once the time is gone it’s never coming back! Did you know PAZO can assist you in solving all retail-related operations by digitizing the manual paper-based checklists? You can easily schedule and automate daily, weekly and monthly checklists as per your needs.
Learn more about PAZO Operations Management System
3. Planning Quality Assurance Programs
For a business that has its own products and is planning to sell it; quality plays the most crucial part of the company’s success story. An operations manager is often the person to create a quality assurance program and plans to execute it. To set up a quality assurance program, an operations manager might need to:
- Create quality standards
- Create procedures and policies
- Create a description for the quality program
- Create a quality assurance committee
- Implement corrective measures plan
Of course, we all know this is a much deeper topic than just these aforementioned five points, but with this, you will get to know an overall gist of what an operations manager goes through in their job.
In product-based business, quality is what the customer says it is. Worse yet, customers’ expectations are always changing and they are always higher! So to define quality, an operations manager must know what’s crucial to their customers and they must never stop updating that knowledge over time.
Remedy: Quality guru W. Edwards Deming once stated, “Workers are responsible for 15 percent of the problems; the system, for the other 85 percent. The system is the responsibility of management.” When Deming said the system, he meant process as it’s typically called today. In other words, workers can only perform as well as the process allows them.
So, try to employ software which can solve your quality assurance related problems. Utilize a good mobile app that you can instantly access from anywhere. If they have a web-app version of their mobile app, it’s even better because it is quite possible that you’re working on a system and you want to access the software from your desktop!
What we are trying to say is- we all need flexibility! We deeply understand that all operations managers can’t work on a cellphone or a workstation at times; so a system would be great which can be accessed from anywhere. PAZO comes into picture in this scenario because one of the best features of PAZO is offline syncing; which means you don’t need an internet connection right at the moment; you can do your work and it will be saved internally and once you have the internet connectivity, everything will be synced automatically; without your action(s) being required!
Originally published at https://www.gopazo.com on June 17, 2019.
