Operations and Project Management

You are required to write a 1,500-word report assessing and providing recommendations for the improvement of the Operations Management of a specific chosen outlet. Your chosen outlet can be any retail store, supermarket, bank, pharmacy,or any other outlet you decide upon. You are required solely to make your own observations and draw on secondary data and your own opinions and conclusions. You are not expected and indeed should not (for ethical reasons) seek views or data from anyone else, such as customers or business staff/owners. Whilst visiting the outlet, you are expected to collect some evidence relevant to the tasks below.

BRIEF
1. Provide an overview of your chosen establishment’s operations, supported by an illustration of the end-to-end supply chain of the chosen outlet in a diagram

2. Create a process map of the existing service operation from a customer’s perspective, including actions, timings, waits, delays, and decision points. Suggest changes that improve the customer experience and illustrate these with a new process map – ie before and after process maps

3. Making reference to quality attributes, benchmark and assess the current performance of the operation with respect to delivered service quality compared to a specific direct competitor outlet.

4. Using an importance-performance matrix, identify and justify an improvement priority you would recommend to the operation’s service quality provision, explicitly stating scope, target audience and planned outcome of your recommended improvement.

5. Produce a high-level plan, supported by a Gantt chart for a six-month project to implement the improvement you have recommended in Task 4 above. Develop a risk register to show how you would control the risks during implementation of the project.