Every company has an operations department (knowingly or not) to keep up with daily functions, but not everyone truly understands what is the objective and main tasks of operations as it can vary from organisation to organisation. An operations department’s main focus is to maintain the efficiency of core tasks and support other teams with tasks that will contribute to their workflow optimisation as well.
In this article, we will outline:
- What is operations management
- 5 Functions and tools of operations management
- Why it is important
- How workflow tools can improve operations management
What operations management?
Let’s get creative, think of your organisation as a bus station. Imagine each team department as a bus parting to different destinations with their passengers (in this case their projects or ideas). An operations manager is basically the station’s transport coordinator that ensures that everyone is on track and everything is running smoothly. As much as a transport coordinator oversees transportation arrangements, staff schedule, and coordinate customer demand, operations management has its own core 5 functions:
- Planning and strategizing
- Feedback sharing
- Quality Control
- Forecasting
- Organising and resources management
5 Functions and tools of operations management
As mentioned above, operations is involved in almost all aspects of a company and play a vital role in supporting and helping other team departments with their workflow and needs to accomplish a project or task. Depending on the industry of your organisation, your operations management might be more linked to logistics, supply chain, and finances, while for others it might work more closely with the marketing and sales teams. However, regardless the organisation type and size, these are the five main functions and tools that you should consider for operations management:
1. Planning and strategizing -> Task manager
The number one core function in operations management is planning and strategizing–sounds easy, but it can get more complicated than what it seems. In order to maintain a smooth workflow, it’s important to have a strategy to plan it by considering all dependencies and key members involved to fulfill a task. Task management tools like the one MORNINGMATE offers make this process easy by condensing it into 5 simple steps where you can organise your tasks and subtasks and assign all team members involved in each process.
2. Feedback sharing -> Article post
Feedback culture has never been more important in an organisation’s corporate environment, it not only makes employees feel heard but also motivates them to do quality work with more responsibility. Although this might seem like a “common sense” type of function, sharing feedback can be one of the most difficult communicational skills between team members and even departments. With MORNINGMATE that communicanal barrier is decreased thanks to the seamless and engaging options you have to communicate with your team, whether it is by sharing an idea or information you have through an article post or by giving your feedback through comments directly on a post or task you or a team member uploaded on the project board.
3. Quality control -> To-do list
Although to-do lists are amazing tools when you need to keep track of quick tasks and reminders, you can use this tool and take it to the next level with MORNINGMATE. You can make To-do lists for quality control either for yourself, only managers, or the entire team, and assign each checkpoint to its corresponding manager as well as setting deadlines and priority levels for each item listed.
4. Forecasting -> Performance report
Forecasting is probably one of the most difficult functions for operations management as it’s about analysing the current workflow in order to know what needs to be changed or implemented in order to improve it or to know what to expect in the near future based on previous patterns. That’s why MORNINGMATE offers performance indicators not only for each project board and task, but overall as an organisation by connecting team members, tasks, and goal fulfillments so that you can easily analyze and make better solid decisions based on real data of your company.
5. Organising resources -> Storage hub
One of the biggest headaches in operation management is organising all resources and assets, especially when departments decide to use different storage drives and services to save their working files and assets. Having a platform like MORNINGMATE not only gives you the tools for your workflow, but also works as a hub for all your organisation’s information so that it’s easy to organise and find important resources and avoid lost or leaked data.
Why is it important?
By this point, it is very evident why having operations management is important for any organisation as it serves as strong bridges between departments to align department decisions with organisational objectives, avoiding unnecessary conflict, and keeping workflows running smoothly. The benefits of operations management are very clear and linked to each other:
- It motivates team members as it helps facilitate their job to have a smooth workflow.
- Takes most advantages of the resources the organisation already has by keeping a good track of all assets.
- Enhances collaboration between departments by providing effective feedback between them.
- Helps achieving objectives faster as it facilitates the communication between teams.
- Improves work productivity as it optimises and eliminates inefficiencies in the work system.
How workflow tools can help you improve operations management
As you have read, operations management oversees a lot of tasks and departments simultaneously that can make the job sometimes overwhelming, especially if you try doing it manually or with outdated conventional work tools. That’s why investing in collaboration tools like MORNINGMATE not only helps save time and money, but to easily and seamlessly improve the productivity and efficiency of your organisation. Remember, a successful operations management doesn’t require complex tools, (the work itself is already complex enough) but the right tools that can simplify and easily adapt to every department and team in your organisation. Not sure how to get started? No need to keep searching, click here and get a FREE consultation with MORNINGMATE.
