Operations Management-Scheduling: (A case study of Amazon.com Inc)

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1.0 Background

            Amazon.com, Inc is a Seattle based company founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos that majorly deals in cloud computing as well as electronic commerce. In reality, the company is the largest tech giant in the world characterised by operations that are internet-based (Ferguson, 2017). Additionally, Amazon.com, Inc started off as an online bookstore and later on changed and modified operations by diversifying to sell other products. Conversely, the company also deals in consumer electronics and is acknowledged as the largest dealer in cloud infrastructure worldwide. Nonetheless, the company also sells various products that are considered low-end for instance USB cables under the umbrella unit of AmazonBasics. To further add on that, Amazon.com Inc surpassed Walmart in 2015 to become the most valuable retailer concerning market capitalisation. 

            Most significantly, according to Ferguson (2017), the success that Amazon.com Inc enjoys depends heavily on the high efficiency attained through the company's operations management that substantially determines productivity. As such through the operations management strategies, Amazon.com Inc can handle various strategic concerns so that to guarantee optimised productivity. It is evident Amazon.com Inc is a notable player in the e-commerce industry thus the company highlights the need and the importance of technologically supported productivity so that to achieve optimal efficiency concerning service delivery. Therefore, Amazon.com Inc is faced with increasingly complex decisions regarding operations management, most notably due to the constant expansion and diversification of the company's business. For that reason, Amazon.com Inc has enhanced the company’s capabilities through the maintenance of operations in spite of the challenges fronted by the world through setting up a model for best practice in enterprise management. 

2.0 Theoretical Review

2.1 Operations Management Theory

            This theory was originally developed to target the manufacturing/production sector companies. This theory tended to address pertinent issues, for instance, stock controls, line balancing among other aspects. Primarily, according to Adam and Ebert (1982) during the early 1980s, after it became apparent that there was a constant increase move aimed towards service sector enterprises, it was revealed this theory was less efficient as it failed to handle and depict the key issues faced by the top management running service sector operations. To further add on that, the techniques and tools utilised by the theory catered for some of the issues that were of real value but the real problems that curtailed the functionality of the service sector included service design, customer service among other relevant aspects (Wild, 1980). However, at that time there was in the adequacy of tools and techniques to handle the operations issues efficiently hence this impacted negatively on the optimisation of service delivery.  

            Nonetheless, a lot of changes have been adopted and put into place since then thus; it has led to the proper handling of real issues so that operation management has been diversified to handle different critical issues facing businesses. In any case, production in sector companies is characterised by the lack of face-to-face contact with the consumers, on the contrary, service sector companies enjoy the interaction with their customers, and this interaction can be underlined as intimate and above all more regular (Adam and Ebert, 1982). For that reason, the communication between customers as well as the amount of satisfaction expressed by the involved parties needs to be looked at keenly and on a different basis as per the two differing sectors. Particularly, in service sector companies’ quality is of the essence for example quality derived from various service processes including courtesy levels depicted by staff, customer service wait times, etc. However, it should be acknowledged that operation managers find it considerably easy to handle tangible products as opposed to intangible services concerning analysing the level of performance.  According to Adam and Ebert (1982), this hurdle is exactly the Achilles heels of any top operation management that must be handled adequately so that to improve service delivery to the end customers.

2.1.1 Aspects of importance in Operation Management Theory

            Within operations management theory several key issues are of high relevance to optimisation of service...