Operations Management

Operations is one of the major functions in an organization along with supply chains, marketing, finance and human resources. If you are preparing for a job role in operations management, then you must check these interview questions.

Q.1 What are the key activities of an operations manager?
Following are the key activities of operations manager -
1. Getting Information
2. Communicating with Supervisors
3. Establishing and Maintaining Interpersonal Relationships
4. Resolving Conflicts and Negotiating with Others
5. Evaluating Information to Determine Compliance with Standards
6. Making Decisions and Solving Problems
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Q.2 As an operations manager, how do you make decisions and solve problems?
As an operations manager I would take decision by analysing information and evaluating results to choose the best solution and solve problems.
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Q.3 As an Operations Managers how would you establish and maintain interpersonal relationships?
As an Operations Managers I would tend to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships by developing constructive and cooperative working relationships with others, and thereby maintaining them over time
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Q.4 As an operations manager how would you evaluate information to determine compliance with standards?
As an operations manager I would evaluate information to determine compliance with standards by using relevant information and individual judgment to determine whether events or processes comply with laws, regulations, or standards.
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Q.5 As an Operations Managers how do you resolve conflicts and negotiate with other parties?
As an Operations Managers I would resolve conflicts and negotiate with other parties by handling complaints, settling disputes, and resolving grievances and conflicts, or otherwise negotiating with others.
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Q.6 What do you understand by the concept of managing budgets as an operations manager?
An operations managers is typically involved in budget planning. Their primary objective is to learn how much has already been spent, and how much will be spent, together with how to spend the remaining budget so as to acquire necessary resources within budget limits.
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Q.7 What is role of operations management in an organization?
Operations management is a business function that is responsible for managing the process of creation of goods and services. It includes planning, coordinating, organizing and controlling all the resources required to produce the goods and services of a company.
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Q.8 What are the levels of operations management?

Operations management has three levels namely

  • strategic
  • tactical
  • operations
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Q.9 What does service life cycle refer to?
The service life cycle refers to the process of identifying the stage in which a product or service is encountering at that time.
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Q.10 What are the dimensions of operations management?
Generally, a business operates along four basic dimensions that are finance, customers, internal processes, learning and innovation.
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Q.11 What are the stages of service life cycle management?
It has four stages including introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Each of these describes what the product or service is incurring at that time.
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Q.12 What are the basic principles of operations management?
Operations management as a discipline, consists of five general functions namely planning, staffing, organizing, leading and controlling.
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Q.13 What do you mean by operations strategy?
Operations strategy is basically the entire pattern of decisions that shape the long-term capabilities of any type of operations and their contribution to the overall strategy.
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Q.14 What are the concepts of operations management?
Operations management is the field of management that is concerned with overseeing, designing as well as controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production.
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Q.15 Define the NSD process.
The NSD process is defined as the collection of actions, activities, tasks, and evaluations which are used to move a project from the idea stage through to launch.
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Q.16 Mention the aspects of service design.

The five aspects of Service design are:

1.New service solutions.

2.Service management systems.

3.Measurement methods and metrics.

4.Processes, roles and capabilities.

5.Technology architectures and management systems.

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Q.17 What do you mean by a service blueprint?
A service blueprint is basically a diagram that visualizes the relationships within various service components including people, props, and processes which are directly tied to touchpoints in a particular customer journey.
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Q.18 What are the tools of operations management?
There are various operations management tools like Six Sigma or DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) which are used to overhaul and enhance operations in an organisation.
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Q.19 What does the term budgeting mean?
Budgeting finds its use to set up, create, and view budgets. Budgeting includes budget control, which one can use so as to monitor the budget funds available for planned and actual purchases and expenditures. Additionally, one can generate budget register entries for the original budget, budget transfers, and revisions. One can also create budget register entries for encumbrances and pre-encumbrances for purchases and planned expenditures. Moreover, budget register entries are automatically generated when budgets are transferred to the general ledger from other modules, like Project management and accounting or Fixed assets.
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Q.20 What is an inventory?
An inventory refers to the items, merchandise, goods and materials that held by a business for the purpose of selling in the market to earn a profit.
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Q.21 How do we create a schedule?
A Schedule can be created by using a consensus-driven estimation method because the schedule itself is an estimate that is, each date in the schedule is estimated, and if those dates don't have the buy-in of the people who are going to do the work then the schedule will be inaccurate.
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Q.22 Explain the intercompany master plan.
The Intercompany master plan calculates the net requirements across legal entities. Also, it connects the demand and supply between companies for short term and long term firm demand, and supply (planned).
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Q.23 What are the types of inventories?

There are four types of inventories:

  • Raw materials
  • WIP
  • Finished goods
  • MRO
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Q.24 What is the use of output orders?
Output orders find their use in linking sales order lines and then transfer order lines with the outbound picking processes that use the picking lists.
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Q.25 What is the bullwhip effect?
The bullwhip effect is nothing but a distribution channel phenomenon wherein demand forecasts yield supply chain inefficiencies.
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Q.26 What resource types are available in Supply Chain Management ?
The resource types available in Supply Chain Management are vendor, machine, human resources, location, tool and facility.
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Q.27 What does demand forecasting refer to?
Demand forecasting finds its use to predict independent demand from sales orders and dependent demand at any decoupling point for the orders of customers. Further, the enhanced demand forecast reduction rules offer an ideal solution for mass customization.
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Q.28 What is an operational definition?
An operational definition enables the researchers to explain in a particular way what they mean when they use a specific term. Usually, operational definitions are concrete and measurable.
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Q.29 Define operation tool.
An operations tool is an equipment or piece of machine that is operational in use or is ready for use.
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Q.30 What do you mean by schedule control process?
The Control Schedule Process is the procedure of monitoring the project's status so as to determine if the requirements of the project baseline are met. Besides, the status of activities and workforce utilization provides the standards for measurement in order to determine the schedule variance.
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Q.31 What is an inventory sheet?
An inventory sheet is a checklist of inventory type, price per unit, amount that one has, and SKU or serial number.
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Q.32 Explain the EOQ model.
EOQ stands for Economic order quantity that is the ideal order quantity a company should purchase so as to minimize the inventory costs like holding costs, shortage costs, and order costs.
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Q.33 How is inventory calculated?
The general formula for the calculation of inventory is: Beginning inventory + net purchases – COGS = ending inventory.
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Q.34 What is the purpose of an inventory tracker?
An inventory tracker is any inventory management software, or dashboard that allows you track real-time inventory levels of each SKU for better inventory control in your stores.
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Q.35 What are the inventory management methods?
The three popular inventory management methods are the push technique, the pull technique and the just-in-time technique.
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Q.36 Define beginning inventory.
Beginning inventory is the nothing but the book value of the inventory of a company at the start of an accounting period.
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Q.37 What is average inventory?
Average inventory, as the name suggests is the average value of an inventory within a specific time period, that can vary from the median value of the same data set.
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Q.38 Mention the types of forecasting models?

The three basic types of forecasting models are:

  • Time series analysis and projection
  • Qualitative techniques
  • Causal models
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Q.39 Define forecasting.
Forecasting is a method that uses historical data as inputs for making informed estimates that are predictive in finding the direction of future trends.
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Q.40 What is quantitative forecasting?
Quantitative forecasting models are useful for forecasting future data as a function of past data. For example, informed opinion and judgment, market research, the Delphi method and historical life-cycle analogy.
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Q.41 When should we use Six Sigma?
Six Sigma should be used when there is a requirement to define an unknown cause or situation and when issues are not defined well.
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Q.42 What do you mean by capacity management?
Capacity management is the large variety of planning actions that are used to ensure that a business infrastructure has appropriate resources to maximize its potential activities and production output under any condition.
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Q.43 Mention some capacity management tools.

The five different types of capacity management tools are:

1.Performance monitoring

2.Workload stacking

3.Trending 4.Analytical modeling

5.Simulation modeling

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Q.44 What is the use of capacity management?
The main goal is to ensure that the capacity of the IT services and infrastructure is capable of meet the agreed-upon needs of capacity and performance in a manner that is both timely and cost-effective.
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Q.45 Explain the define phase of Six Sigma.
The define phase is the first step of the Lean Six Sigma improvement process. The project team creates a Project Charter in this phase that is a high-level map of the process and begins to understand the requirements of the customers of the process.
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Q.46 How is Six Sigma useful?
Six Sigma helps in enhancing the quality of the final products by finding and eliminating the causes of errors and decreasing variance in manufacturing processes.
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Q.47 What does QFD stand for?
QFD stands for Quality Function Deployment. This is a structured approach for defining the needs of customers and translating them into plans for producing products to meet those needs.
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Q.48 What are the phases of QFD?

There are four phases of QFD:

  • Product planning
  • Product development
  • Process planning
  • Production planning
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Q.49 What is Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is a kind of quality-control technique. It emphasizes cycle-time improvement while at the same time decreasing manufacturing defects to a level of no more than 3.4 occurrences per million units or events.
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Q.50 Mention the Six Sigma tools.
  • Value-Stream Mapping.
  • Kanban System.
  • The 5 Whys.
  • Cause-and-Effect Analysis.
  • Pareto Chart.
  • Project Charter.
  • Process Mapping.
  • RACI Matrix.
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Q.51 Name the types of capacity management?

1.Lead strategy

2.Lag strategy

3.Match strategy

4.Dynamic strategy

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Q.52 What are the elements of capacity management?
Capacity management creates new ideas and terms that should be discussed before their implementation. These include component, capacity report, capacity plan, capacity management information system as well as performance.
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Q.53 Is there any disadvantage of Six Sigma?
Since, Six Sigma is applied to all the aspects of the production as well as planning process, therefore, it may create rigidity and bureaucracy that may generate delays and stifle creativity.
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Q.54 Which industries use Six Sigma?
Six Sigma has a key role in manufacturing and improvement Industry. Most of the industries focus on producing raw material useful to make other things.
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Q.55 What are the levels of Six Sigma?

The six steps of the Six Sigma process are based on (DMAIC Methodology) for finding and fixing defects in a process -

  • defining
  • measuring
  • analysing
  • improve
  • controlling,
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Q.56 In a forecasting system, what is the first step?
The first step in the forecasting system is to tell the system to use the data set by setting the Data Set field.
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