St. John’s University
Mgt. 111 - Operations Management	<insert your name here>
Dr. Patrick Lyons	As of: 8/30/04
Application of Operations Management
Verbal Outline

I.	Objective - to reinforce the wide applicability of operations management, especially for students who have careers in accounting, finance, or marketing.

II.	Topic - Stopwatch Time Study, pages 780–783 of Russell and Chapter 17 outline V.A.

III.	Situation - Need to develop proper sizing of service delivery to meet client needs. This is an actual situation currently being supported by my organization.
A.	Position – Delivery Project Executive. Manage IT Service Delivery for a number of large clients. Current annual project and service portfolio in excess of $135 Million.
1.	Environment:
a)	Workstation build/deploy support provided to user population of over 2,500 at 6 locations across the United States.
b)	12 IT Specialists supporting end user community providing both “build/deploy” and “break/fix” workstation support.
2.	Challenge
a)	All 2,500 workstations require a major security upgrade by March 31. Can it be done with the available resources and at what commitment rate?
b)	Client has a $160,000 contingency budget. Can this activity be contained within this budget?

IV.	Application
A.	Construct Appropriate Stopwatch Time Study (See Ch 17 - V.A)
1.	Divide task into elements 
2.	Time and rate the worker as task is performed 
3.	Compute normal time 
a)	Normal time = S (performance rating) * (avg actual time) 
b)	Performance rating - evaluation of individual worker compared to normal worker. 
4.	Compute standard time - allows for unavoidable delays, fatigue, personal time, …
    Standard time = (Normal time) * (1 + Allowance factor) 
B.	See worksheet for details.

V.	Analysis
A.	Impact on Human Resources - IT Specialists
1.	Because of other duties, the IT Specialists should only devote 50% of their time to the upgrade.
2.	Each of the 12 IT Specialists have, on average, 390 hours of work available until the March 31 deadline.
3.	Using the above time standard, the 12 IT Specialists will spend 46% of their time on the upgrade. See worksheet for details.
4.	Thus, staffing constraint is satisfied.
B.	Improvements in Operations - compared with previous upgrades, there will be:
1.	Enhanced customer service - end user downtime hours reduced from 125 hours/upgrade to 35 hours/upgrade.
2.	Reduced errors - because IT Specialists are not rushed, the number of workstations requiring rework is reduced from 215/upgrade to 27/upgrade.
3.	Transaction costs - because the IT Specialists will spend < 50% of their time on the upgrade, there will be no overtime and the cost ($127,053) will be contained within the budget ($160,000).  See worksheet for details.

VI.	Note - The outline for your case may vary considerably from this one.
A.	This case is based on one submitted by Mr. Vincent J. Pawlowski.
B.	Saved as Word 97 & 6.0/95 - RTF format.