It goes without saying that the first thing the manufacturing companies have to decide is what goods to produce and what services to render. Introducing new products obviously requires doing market research, identifying market opportunities and accurate sales forecasting. Manufactures should also concentrate on the quality of the goods produced and services rendered.
Companies are faced with a ‘make or buy’ decision for every process or service.Thus, manufacturing companies have to decide how much research and development (R&D) to do. Should they do fundamental or applied research themselves, or use research institutes, universities and independent research laboratories, or simply license a product or service designs from other organisations when necessary?
Decisions about what products to make or what services to offer have to take into account a company’s operational capability, labour, capital and equipment requirements. After it has been decided what to manufacture, operations management have to decide where to manufacture (whether it is necessary to construct a new plant, where to locate it and how to lay it out), what production facilities to have, how much productive capacity the factory or plant should have and how much inventory to maintain (the necessary level of inventory parts and finished products). Decisions have to be also made concerning the hiring of staff, the purchase of equipment and so on. In Reading III we are going to concentrate on some of these issues.
