Organizations are increasingly understood as key and supporting processes that produce value in a value adding stream or flow. Process management is about how organizations produce goods and services. Operations produce goods and services by managing processes to change the state or condition of something to produce outputs. Banks will typically process customers and information, factories will typically process material, hospitals will typically process customers in terms of patients, consultants will typically process information and customers, and shipping companies and ports will typically process goods in transport. Transforming resources are facilities and staff. Process management deals with planning, choosing resources, organizing, controlling and auditing the processes. It is all about the value creation in the line organization but little about the administrative routines of indirect functions.

In the course the organization is analyzed as a transforming system, i.e. in an input-transformation -output process perspective with a key issue: What are the managerial challenges of designing and managing processes that best support the business mission and make the organization competitive? A major task is improving efficiency and effectiveness of processes within and outside of the organization. To deal with these challenges the issues are raised of how to analyze and design processes both from an operational and strategic view. What is the layout and flow of processes? The course is designed around the textbook so – following the introduction – the question arises of how processes can be designed, managed and controlled. To monitor processes, planning and control is raised as a core theme of the course and includes tools like capacity planning, inventory planning, enterprise resource planning, lean operations and Just-In-Time. Quality assurance, planning and control are other important areas.

Books:

· Slack, N, Brandon-Jones, A, Johnston, R, Betts, A.: Operations and Process Management, Pearson, 3rd ed., 2012

         - Åhlström & Modig: This is Lean: Resolving the efficiency paradox, Rheologica Publishing, 2013

Articles:

• Ackoff, Russell L.: Systems thinking and thinking systems. Systems Dynamics Review, Vol. 10, No. 2-3, 1994
• Baines, Tim, Lightfoot, Howard, Peppard, Joe, Johnson, Mark, Tiwari, Ashutosh, Shehab, Essam & Swink, Morgan: Towards an operations strategy for product-centric servitization.  International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 29, No. 5, 2009
• Karlsson, Christer & Åhlström, Pär: Assessing Changes Towards Lean Production. International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1996
• Karlsson, Christer: The Development of Industrial Networks –Challenges to Operations Management in an Extraprise.  International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2003
• Mikkola, Juliana .H.: Modularity, component outsourcing, and inter-firm learning. R & D Management, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2003
• Salvador, Fabrizio., De Holan, Pablo M. & Piller, Frank: Cracking the Code of Mass Customization.  Mit Sloan Management Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2009