Operations Management and Process Improvement

You fixed the same backlog last month. It's back. You added people, bought the software, told everyone to try harder — and the orders still take three weeks when the actual work is two hours. The problem was never effort. It was that nobody could see where the work really gets stuck, or prove whether yesterday's change helped. This course hands you the way operations professionals actually diagnose and fix a process — the same toolkit, whether you run a clinic, a warehouse, a support team, or an assembly line. You'll learn to measure what matters (and why keeping everyone busy quietly makes things slower), to find the one bottleneck that governs your whole output instead of optimizing the parts that don't, and to tell the difference between routine variation you should leave alone and a real signal worth chasing. From there it's redesign: stripping waste, pulling work instead of pushing it, mistake-proofing the step that keeps going wrong, sizing capacity to demand instead of drowning at every peak. Then the part most improvement efforts skip — making the gain hold after the project ends, so you're not back here next quarter. You'll meet the real methods by their real names — Little's Law, value stream mapping, the five focusing steps, control charts, takt time, kanban, SMED, DMAIC — but always as tools you reach for in response to a symptom, never as jargon. No statistics background, no certification, no factory required. Every idea lands in both a service and a production example. By the end you can take a process that's too slow, too inconsistent, or always behind, and run a real improvement on it — measured, diagnosed, redesigned, and made to stick.