Operations Management

Course Description

Operations Management covers the application of quantitative and qualitative management techniques for improving quality and efficiency of manufacturing and service organizations, with coverage of productivity, quality, forecasting, design of goods/services, project management and other related topics.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, MAN is the Management prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Business Administration, College of Business. It is offered at approximately 18 Florida institutions.

⚠⚠ This is the only course in the MAN prefix with a genuine course prerequisite in statistics. UWF requires STA 2023 and 45 completed hours. That combination tells you what the course is: the quantitative one.

Operations management is where a business degree becomes concrete. Forecasting demand, sizing capacity, scheduling work, setting inventory levels and measuring quality are calculations with answers, and students who chose business to avoid mathematics find this course a reckoning. It is also, for that reason, one of the most employable courses in the degree.

⚠ Note that UWF says "manufacturing AND service organizations." That matters enormously in Florida, where the dominant employers are services — healthcare, hospitality, tourism, logistics and government, not factories. Queueing, capacity under variable demand, and service quality measurement are more relevant here than production line balancing, and a good course will weight them accordingly.

The single most useful idea in the course is that variability, not average load, is what causes queues. A hospital emergency department, a theme park ride, and a call centre all fail in the same way and for the same reason — and once you can see it, you see it everywhere.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the operations function and its role in organisational strategy.
• Distinguish operations in manufacturing from operations in services.
• Measure and interpret productivity and its components.
• Describe competitive priorities and operational trade-offs.
• Apply forecasting techniques including moving averages and exponential smoothing.
• Measure and interpret forecast error and select a forecasting method.
• Describe product and service design and its operational consequences.
• Describe process selection, process design, and process mapping.
• Apply capacity planning methods and evaluate capacity decisions.
• Describe facility location and layout decisions and their trade-offs.
• Apply line balancing to a production or service process.
• Describe quality management philosophy and total quality management.
• Apply statistical process control and interpret control charts.
• Distinguish common cause from special cause variation.
• Describe process capability and its measurement.
• Describe Six Sigma and lean methods and their differences.
• Describe waste identification and continuous improvement.
• Apply inventory models including economic order quantity.
• Describe inventory classification and safety stock reasoning.
• Describe material requirements planning and enterprise resource planning.
• Describe supply chain management and the bullwhip effect.
• Apply scheduling and sequencing rules and evaluate the outcome.
• Describe waiting line behaviour and the effect of variability.
• Apply project management techniques including critical path analysis.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a real organisation or case study.
• Work effectively in a team with defined roles and deadlines.
• Present and defend a recommendation to a business audience.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify their output.
• Build a portfolio artefact suitable for showing an employer.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The operations function and strategy
• Manufacturing versus service operations
• Productivity measurement
• Competitive priorities and trade-offs
• Forecasting techniques
• Forecast error and method selection
• Product and service design
• Process selection, design, and mapping
• Capacity planning
• Location and layout
• Line balancing
• Quality management and TQM
• Statistical process control and control charts
• Common cause and special cause variation
• Process capability
• Six Sigma and lean
• Waste and continuous improvement
• Inventory models and EOQ
• Inventory classification and safety stock
• MRP and ERP
• Supply chain and the bullwhip effect
• Scheduling and sequencing
• Waiting lines and variability
• Project management and critical path

Optional Topics

• Applied case studies and live organisations
• Team practice and role definition
• Presenting to a business audience
• AI-assisted tooling and its governance
• Portfolio development

Resources & Tools

• The operations text the instructor assigns — Heizer and Render's Operations Management, Stevenson's Operations Management, and Jacobs and Chase are the three standards.
• Microsoft Excel including Solver and the Analysis ToolPak — free through the UWF Microsoft 365 licence. ⚠ Enable both add-ins in week one; a great deal of this course is done in Excel and students lose time to not knowing they exist.
• ASQ (American Society for Quality) (asq.org) — substantial free material; the quality tools, control chart guidance, and the certification pathways.
• ASCM/APICS (ascm.org) — the supply chain and operations professional body; student membership is cheap and CPIM is a recognised credential.
• Your statistics notes from STA2023 — free, and genuinely needed. Control charts and forecast error are applied statistics; if the prerequisite is a distant memory, revisit it before term.
• The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt — a novel about a factory, frequently assigned, and the most readable introduction to constraint thinking in print.
• The UWF library's business databases — included in enrolment; industry reports and practitioner sources sit behind paywalls a student already has access to, and most never find out.
• LinkedIn Learning — frequently free through UWF or a Florida public library card; strong on specific tools, weak on judgement.

Career Pathways

• General and operations manager (SOC 11-1021) — the broadest destination, and the one most graduates reach through a functional role first.
• Human resources specialist (SOC 13-1071) and human resources manager (SOC 11-3121) — the specialist role is the normal entry point; the manager role follows experience.
• Training and development specialist (SOC 13-1151) and compensation and benefits analyst (SOC 13-1141).
• Project management specialist (SOC 13-1082) — and note that project work is entered from every discipline, not only from business.
• Logistician and supply chain analyst (SOC 13-1081), purchasing agent (SOC 13-1023), operations analyst (SOC 13-1111, management analyst).
• Management trainee and rotational programmes — ⚠ these recruit on a fixed annual cycle, often a year ahead. Students who wait until spring of their final year have already missed most of them.
• ⚠ Florida employer landscape: healthcare systems (AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist, Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola) are among the state's largest employers and run substantial HR and operations functions; hospitality and theme parks (Disney, Universal, and the cruise lines out of Miami, Port Canaveral and Tampa) are operations-intensive at enormous scale; defence and aerospace (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and the Navy presence around Pensacola); logistics and distribution around Jacksonville and Central Florida; agriculture and food processing; and state, county and municipal government.
• Small and family business is a genuine Florida destination, not a fallback — the state has a very high rate of small business formation, and the SBDC network at Florida universities, including UWF, provides free consulting.

AI Integration

Management is being changed by AI in two distinct ways, and they need separating. The first is AI as a tool a manager uses. The second is AI as something a manager must govern — deployed in hiring, scheduling, performance evaluation and forecasting, where the consequences fall on people.

• Where AI tools genuinely help managers: drafting documents and correspondence, summarising long material, preparing meeting notes and first-draft plans, analysing survey and operational data, and rehearsing a difficult conversation before having it.
• ⚠ Where they fail: they fabricate confidently — including citations, statutes and figures; they do not know your organisation, your people, or your context; and they produce fluent text that reads as considered when nothing was considered.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Employment decisions are the highest-risk application, and this is not hypothetical. AI screening tools have been shown to reproduce and amplify bias present in historical hiring data. Under United States law the employer is liable for discriminatory outcomes regardless of whether a vendor's tool produced them, and disparate impact does not require intent. The EEOC has issued guidance specifically on this.
• ⚠⚠ Regulation is arriving and it is not uniform. Several jurisdictions now require bias auditing or candidate notification for automated employment decision tools. Where your employees and applicants are located determines what applies — not where your office is.
• Never put employee or applicant personal data into a public AI tool. Personnel records, medical information, disciplinary matters and compensation data must stay in controlled systems. This is a common and serious early-career mistake.
• ⚠ A human must own every consequential decision. "The system flagged it" is not an explanation you can give an employee, a regulator, or a court. Keep a person accountable, and be able to state the reason in plain language.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, and disclose what you used when asked. In a course teaching judgement, outsourcing the judgement defeats the purpose — which is a practical point, not a moral one.

Special Information

⚠⚠ A standing requirement — 45 completed hours — not a course prerequisite

• UWF publishes: "Completion of 45 hours of college course work is required prior to taking this course." That measures how far through a degree you are, not what you have studied.
• ⚠⚠ UWF uses more than one threshold in this prefix. Most MAN courses require 45 hours; MAN4280 and MAN4441 require 60; MAN3802 requires none. Do not assume the number carries across courses — read each entry.
• These are easy to overlook because they name no course and so never appear in a prerequisite chain.
• ⚠ Transfer students should confirm how their credit counts toward the total. Accepted transfer hours normally count, but dual enrolment, credit by examination and developmental coursework are treated differently by different institutions. Ask College of Business advising rather than assuming.
• Business colleges commonly layer further gates on top — admission to the major, a minimum grade point average, and a minimum grade in each core course. Confirm all of these against your own catalog year.

⚠⚠ Ideas from this course that transfer to any organisation

• Variability causes queues, not average load. A system running at 85% average utilisation with high variability queues badly; the same system with low variability does not. This explains emergency departments, airport security, call centres and theme park rides — and why "we have enough capacity on average" is not an answer.
• ⚠ A process cannot run faster than its bottleneck, so improvements anywhere else produce inventory rather than output. Find the constraint before optimising anything.
• ⚠⚠ Do not react to common cause variation. Treating normal fluctuation as a special event — investigating every dip, adjusting after every result — makes performance worse, measurably and reliably. Knowing which kind of variation you are looking at is the whole point of a control chart.
• Inventory is a decision, not an accident. It buys protection against variability and it costs money; the question is always how much protection is worth the carrying cost.
• The bullwhip effect explains why supply chains overreact. Small demand changes amplify upstream, and the cure is information sharing rather than better forecasting.

⚠ Why this is one of the most employable courses in a business degree

• Operations roles exist in every organisation and are less crowded than marketing or finance.
• Florida's largest employers are operations-intensive: hospital systems, theme parks, cruise lines, airports, distribution centres and the logistics corridor around Jacksonville and Central Florida.
• ⚠ Healthcare operations is the growth area worth naming — patient flow, capacity, scheduling and quality measurement are the same problems under different vocabulary, and healthcare systems pay well for people who understand them.
• A Six Sigma Green Belt or an APICS CPIM alongside this course is a strong signal and is reachable as a student.

Certifications and credentials worth knowing about

• Human resources: SHRM-CP (Society for Human Resource Management) and PHR (HRCI) are the two entry-level credentials. ⚠ SHRM-CP can be sat by students in their final year at SHRM-aligned programmes, and student membership is inexpensive — ask the College of Business whether UWF's HR curriculum is SHRM-aligned, because it changes your eligibility timing.
• Project management: CAPM is designed for people without project experience and is the realistic student credential; PMP requires documented leading experience and comes later. PMI student membership substantially reduces the exam cost.
• Operations and supply chain: APICS/ASCM CPIM and CSCP, and ISM's CPSM for purchasing. Six Sigma Green Belt is widely recognised in manufacturing and healthcare operations.
• ⚠ A degree and a certification do different jobs. The degree is durable; certifications are current, specific, and expire. Employers ask for both and neither substitutes for the other.
• Experience beats both for most of these roles. An internship, a student organisation officer post, or a real project you can describe outperforms a certification with no practice behind it — and SHRM and PMI both run student chapters worth joining.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — which matters in this prefix, where MAN2021 and MAN3025 both introduce management and only the second is upper division.

⚠⚠ Business programmes add a layer SCNS does not. Many Florida business colleges are AACSB accredited, and AACSB programmes commonly limit how much upper-division business coursework may transfer in — frequently requiring a substantial share to be taken in residence. A course can articulate under SCNS and still not count toward the major. Check the receiving programme's residency rule before relying on a transfer.

⚠ UWF states of its BSBA capstone that it "must be taken at UWF." Residency rules of that kind are common in business programmes and are worth checking early, because they cannot be worked around late.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with case analysis, team project work, and written and oral reporting. ⚠ Management courses are graded substantially on communication, which surprises students who expected a quantitative business course.
• ⚠ No fee notices appear anywhere in the MAN prefix, and no "permission is required" marking except on the BSBA capstone. Enrolment is gated by standing and by MAN3301.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision in the College of Business, and an online section of a team-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. A course offered in one term only will delay a sequence by a full year if missed — confirm with the department.

MAN3504 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.