Business operations concern the on-going activities of the business.

Operations is distinct from projects that have a limited time. Rather, operations concerns all of the continuous activities necessary to deliver the business’s value proposition to customers or clients.

Of course, the nature of operations are going to be unique to the particular business. There are, however, numerous aspects of operations common to most business.

The primary areas of operations include:

• Research and development (engineering),
• Production (manufacturing) or service delivery,
• Procurement,
• Inventory mangement,
• Supply chain management and logistics,
• Quality control, and
• Customer service

In this section, we will explore the basics of each of these areas of operations. We will begin by looking at the operations planning process. From there, we will dive a bit deeper into some of the functional aspects of operations.