Who is primarily responsible for productivity in an organization? List some factors that can affect productivity and some ways that productivity can be improved.

Productivity is described as a measure of the effective use of resources, usually expressed as the ratio of output to input. This ratio can be computed for a single operation, a department, an organization, or even an entire country. In an organization, the operations manager is the one primary responsible to achieve productive use of an organization’s resources but I would argue that productivity is the responsibility of all within an organization since it only makes sense to have everyone pulling in the same direction for the organization to be as productive as possible.

There are multiple factors that affect productivity. Among them are methods, capital and technology, quality, and management. Before starting the improvement process, an organization needs to develop productivity measures for all operations and look at the system as a whole to decide which operations are most critical. Developing methods for achieving productivity improvements can be done by soliciting ideas from workers, studying the competition and other firms to see how they have increased productivity and reexamining how work is done. Reasonable goals must be established for improvement.

Considering the multiple factors that affect productivity, there are many steps that can be taken in order to improve it, both in the short term and in the long turn. Long term improvements can be done by improving the basic process by research and development and by improving and providing new equipment and machinery. A possible medium term improvement would be simplifying the product and reducing the variety. In the short term, managers need to find quick ways to improve the methods and procedures used and improve the planning of work