Operations management is the applied science of designing and managing systems through which work, information, and resources flow to produce reliable outcomes under constraints and uncertainty. It examines how organizations transform scarce resources, including labor, capital, materials, information, technology, and managerial attention, into products, services, decisions, and customer experiences that can be delivered consistently, efficiently, and at scale. This course develops the principles that govern operational systems.
Although the course draws on familiar business settings, including manufacturing, services, supply chains, digital platforms, and last-mile delivery, its principles are far more general. The same operational mechanisms that create congestion in a hospital emergency department or an AI service pipeline also shape the performance of startups, financial institutions, technology companies, consulting firms, and public-sector organizations. They also influence how individuals organize their own time, attention, and decisions. A central aim of the course is to help students see operations as a general framework for understanding organized activity: how work, information, decisions, and resources move through systems characterized by constraints, variability, feedback, and incomplete information.
By the end of the course, students will be able to diagnose operational systems, identify their fundamental constraints, reason rigorously about tradeoffs, and redesign processes to improve speed, cost, quality, scalability, resilience, and customer value. These capabilities are essential for consultants, entrepreneurs, investors, general managers, and leaders in marketing, finance, accounting, technology, and strategy. They are especially important in an economy increasingly shaped by AI, where sustainable advantage comes not from adopting new technologies alone, but from redesigning the systems through which technology creates value.
