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Operational Barriers to Success

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Submitted By jeffsnowcow
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Operational Barriers to Success
Operations Management: Solutions to Business Challenges

Abstract
There are many obstacles in any given business operations that can impact a company’s efficiencies, morale, supply chain, and it’s customer base. Identifying these obstacles and creating processes to mitigate them is paramount to a company’s success. In this paper, we will explore a few of them in order to better understand the cause and effect of these barriers. We will also look at various possible solutions to the barriers by investigating a case study for an architectural firm in which I used to work for.

Week 1 - Assignment 3: Operational Barriers to Success What are some tools that an organization could use to move the company forward? This is a question that is not easily answerable, but is at its core, a very valuable and necessary function to understand. Tools such as Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (S.W.O.T) analysis (Russell, 2010) is a very theoretical way of identifying the companies overall mission as well as understanding the needs to stay competitive in its given market place. However, there are more pragmatic ways of looking at a firm’s efficiency and areas of opportunity to better the operating processes within an organization. Some of these other tools that todays leading firms can utilize to further the market share are things like workflow analysis (Russell, 2010), data flow charts and diagrams, and value engineering (Jergeas, G. F., Cooke, V. G., & Hartman, F. T., 1999) where a firm can look at a metric driven analysis of any given projects efficiency to Return On Investment (ROI) (Russell, 2010) and build in deeper value when better understood. These types of analytics can help identify areas of opportunity easily seen by all key stakeholders. The value and net gain that comes from evaluation models can produce

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