Anupindi R., Chopra S. et al. Managing Business Process Flows

Anupindi R., Chopra S., Deshmukh S.D., Van Mieghem J.A., Zemel E. — 3rd Edition. — Prentice Hall, 2012. — 353 p. — ISBN: 0136036376, 9780136036371.In this book, we present a novel approach to studying the core concepts in operations, which is one of the three major functional fields in business management, along with finance and marketing. We view the task, and the raison d’être, of operations management as structuring (designing), managing, and improving organizational processes and use the process view as the unifying paradigm to study operations. We address manufacturing as well as service operations in make-to-stock as well as make-to-order environments.We employ a structured data-driven approach to discuss the core operations management concepts in three steps:
Model and understand a business process and its flows.
Study causal relationships between the process structure and operational and financial performance metrics.
Formulate implications for managerial actions by filtering out managerial “levers” (process drivers) and their impact on operational and financial measures of process performance.The first edition of this book was published in 1999 and reflected our experiences from teaching the core Operations Management course at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. The second edition, published in 2006, improved exposition and clarified the link between theory and practice. While this third edition retains the general process-view paradigm, we have striven to sharpen the development of the ideas in each chapter, illustrate with contemporary examples from practice, and eliminated some content to make room for some new content, such as:
Opening vignettes and real-life examples of how the theory can be applied in practice have been made current. In addition, exposition of material in the chapters has been further improved with technical derivations details and other tangential ideas relegated to chapter appendices.
Chapter 4 has been completely revised, with an emphasis on measurement, analysis of critical path, and management approaches to leadtime improvements. Technical analysis has been shifted to appendices.
Chapter 5 has been substantially revised with emphasis on effective capacity and
bottleneck management, on the effects of product mix on capacity, and on reduction
of capacity waste.
Chapter 6 now includes discussion of quantity discount policies. Discussions of periodic review policies have been added to Chapters 6 and 7.
Chapter 8 has undergone a complete revision and reorganization to improve flow of concepts; we have also added some discussion on priority processing.
Chapter 9 has more details on control charts, includes fraction defective chart, recent applications, discussion of integrated design, and total quality management.
Answers to selected exercises from Chapters 3 to 9 appear at the end of the book.
The end-of-chapter and end-of-book features have been updated.
Finally, we have removed iGrafx simulation (both the software and the associated sample models) from this edition.