Operations Management: Strategies, Processes, and Competitive Advantage
Operations Management Fundamentals
Value Creation and the Transformation Process
Operations Management (OM) is the set of activities that create value in the form of goods and services by transforming inputs into outputs.
- Feedback: Measurements taken at various points in the transformation process.
- Control: The comparison of feedback against previously established standards to determine if corrective action is needed.
- Value Added: The difference between the cost of inputs and the value or price of outputs.
Entrepreneurship and Business Management Essentials
What is Entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is accepting the risk of starting and running a business. It is the capacity and willingness to develop, organize, and manage a business, along with any of its risks, in order to make a profit.
In economics, entrepreneurs utilize labor, land, and capital. From an economic point of view, an entrepreneur is one who brings resources, labor, materials, and other assets into combinations that make their value greater than before. They also introduce changes, innovations,
Read MoreSocial Economy: Actors, Trends, and Challenges
Three Actor Model
Three independent elements interact:
- Business: Taxes decrease.
- State: Wages decrease.
- Society: Labor decreases (doubly so due to technology).
There’s a conventional equilibrium among these actors, but something remains unresolved. Society demands more services and has increasing needs, while the state has fewer resources to meet these needs (this is a core problem in our economy). The part of society called non-profit organizations depends on profit, directly or indirectly, because
Read MoreAudit Program: Key Areas, Working Papers, and Objectives
Key Areas in Audit Program Preparation
When preparing an audit program, auditors should pay close attention to several key areas:
- Hotspots: These areas are particularly sensitive to errors and can vary between companies (e.g., foreign currency balances, loans to directors).
- Significant Areas: These are important due to the amount of interest they generate for users of accounting data. They are often common among companies in the same industry (e.g., fixed assets, sales, and stocks).
- Additional Areas:
Competitive Strategies: Defensive, Offensive, and Growth Tactics
Competitive Strategies for Business Growth
Defensive Strategies: Reducing Competitive Risk
Defensive strategies aim to reduce the risk of attacks from competitors, strengthening and preserving a company’s competitive advantage.
Ways to Protect Competitive Advantage:
- Impeding Attackers’ Actions:
- Expanding the product line and filling market gaps.
- Securing exclusive agreements with suppliers or offering reduced prices to distributors.
- Maintaining products similar to the competition.
- Counteroffensives Against
Financing Options and Technology’s Impact on Business
Business Financing Options
Business Financing: The goal of this essay is to show the advantages and disadvantages of various methods of financing. It includes three ways: credits, crowdfunding, and business angels, which are presented one by one.
Bank Credits
The most famous method of financing is bank credits. Banks may grant a credit, but most of the time, it includes a high price to pay when it comes time to pay back. The latest values actualized on the Bank of Spain’s web page are from 2016,
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