Coursera – An Introduction to Operations Management

Name Product: Coursera – An Introduction to Operations Management
Size: 903 MB
Author: Christian Terwiesch
Website: https://www.coursera.org/course/operations

This course will teach you how to analyze and improve business processes, be it in services or in manufacturing. You will learn how to improve productivity, how to provide more choice to customers, how to reduce response times, and how to improve quality.

About the Course

Remember the last time you went to a restaurant. What did you expect from that restaurant? You wanted to find something on the menu that you liked, you wanted the meal to be prepared according to high quality standards, you wanted to get it quickly and didn’t want to pay too much money for it. Now, remember the last time you went to a doctor’s office or a hospital. What did you want the doctors and nurses to do? You wanted them to provide the right care for you, you wanted the care delivered with great quality, you wanted to get the care quickly, and you (or your insurance) didn’t want to pay too much for it.

Put differently, the management skills that you need to run the operations of a restaurant are the same that you need to run a hospital. And these are the skills you will learn in this course. Specifically, you will learn how to improve productivity, increase responsiveness, provide more choice to the customer, and deliver higher quality standards. In short, you will learn how to analyze business processes and how to improve them. Along the way, you will learn about topics such as Lean Operations, Six Sigma, and the Toyota production system, you will hear about bottlenecks, flows rates, and inventory levels. And, much, much more.

Course Syllabus
The course is broken up into six modules:

Introduction
Process analysis
Productivity
Responsiveness
Quality
Product variety
There are two tracks in this course, an academic track and a practitioner track. For the academic track, the final grade is determined based on five homework assignments and a final exam. It is also possible to complete the course via a practitioner track, which requires the completion of a real world application project.