Unit Title: Strategic Operations for Business Development
Assignment Task: Critically explore the challenges of managing fixed capacity service operations. Include in your discussion ethical dilemmas such as overbooking and queuing strategies (maximum 2500 words).
Unit Learning Outcomes Assessed. The assignment will cover 2 of the 5 unit learning outcomes. Please note this is not the structure for your assignment but covers what you will learn from it.
LO1: Critically evaluate the impact strategic decisions have on operations and logistics within their immediate and extended value chain.
LO3: Evaluate the potential consequences for operations and logistics of ethical and sustainable decision making.
Assignment Details and Instructions.
Background
Service operations are often constrained by the available resources needed to delivery their services, such as the number of seats on a train or airplanes, the number of staff needed for patient care in hospitals, the number and size of class rooms in an education setting. Consequently, operations managers employ several strategies to manage both resources allocation and the management of demand for the services. Strategies include, queuing, pricing differentials, seasonal, timetable and scheduling of buses or class room activities, incentives etc, however choosing the most appropriate strategy poses a challenge to ensure that demand is met, operational resources are used efficiently and effectively.
There is no single answer to all service operations provisioning, for example managing queues in a post office does not pose the same challenges as managing a queue for knee surgery. An empty seat on an airplane is different from an empty seat in a lecture theatre. Timetabling a class in University poses quite different set of issues as opposed to scheduling a refuse collection from homes.
Whatever strategy is employed there are operational trade-offs that can have an impact on both the service provider and the recipient of the service. Similarly, the impact of some decisions may have an ethical and moral dimension to them such as overbooking by airlines and other transport organisations or the priority listings for entry schools and the behaviour of parents to ensure their child’s place.
It is these challenges and the ethical consequences of the operational decision making that you are to explore.
Using examples from different service sectors:
Critically explore the challenges of managing fixed capacity service operations. Include in your discussion the ethical dilemmas such strategies can impose e.g. overbooking and queuing (Maximum 2500 words)
