Operational Management in Industry

Get ready to enter the professional world, because you will spend two days a week working at a company! This company will provide a highly complex problem and situation. You will be part of a small group of students actively engaging in tackling this problem.

Based on knowledge from your courses, you will be able to come up with a solution in a structured way. And most of the time you will also be able to actually implement your solution!

Objectives

• Experience the challenges of an operational manager in a real life situation.
• Experience the conflict of interest between short term and long term targets.
• Analyze how the mission and vision of a company can be translated in a strategy and implemented in the day’s work.
• Analyze these situations.
• Reflect on this experience.

After this programme

After completing this programme, you will be able to develop a strategy for an operational department. You will develop a vision on staffing issues and be able to implement this. You will have knowledge of the standard tools used to manage and plan such a department.

Planning and scheduling are forms of decision-making that play an important role in most manufacturing and service industries. The planning and scheduling functions in a company typically use analytical techniques and heuristic methods to allocate its limited resources to the activities that have to be done. During this module, you will cover the following topics: 

• MPC systems, S&OP, manufacturing and dispatching rules
• Characteristics of service industries, Project and CPM
• Scheduling: programming, shifting bottleneck procedures, annealing, Tabu search and Beam search
• Interval scheduling, reservation systems and timetabling
• Economic Lot Scheduling
• Personnel scheduling problems

Planning and control of heuristics for productions systems can be used in complex production facilities. To be able to use them there, we take advantage of the Siemens Plant Simulation software. This world-renowned software for simulation in production facilities helps you to use heuristics in the real world.

Operations can work based on customer needs or because the company possesses specific competences. How can you produce products or services according to customer needs? Does your customer demand a flexible product? What processes, technology and supply chain solutions are at your disposal to achieve optimal customer satisfaction? That is what you will learn during this module.

Traditionally, we view the supply chain of a tangible product chiefly through a network of different companies, starting with the supplier of raw materials and ending at the end consumer. When the product’s lifecycle is over, it is waste.
Against the backdrop of the Paris Agreement on climate change, this is no longer sufficiently sustainable. Circular economy is a new way of thinking, never considering a product’s lifecycle to be over. It regards supply chains as closed loops.

In our Circular economy classes we present and discuss the development of circular economy. These developments are:

• Circular supplies or designs: using resources that are fully renewable, recyclable or biodegradable.
• Recovering of resources: a company should be able to maximize the  economic value of product return flows.
• Prolonging the product lifecycle: a company’s production system should be focused on extending the lifecycle of products and assets.
• Development of circular economy: collaboration among product users, either individuals or organizations, should be promoted.
• Product as a service: provides an alternative to the traditional model of “buy & own.” Products are used by one or many customers through a lease or pay-for-use arrangement.

Apart from this, we introduce, discuss and work out the principles of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

Complete your exchange semester or year by taking one or more electives. The module Introduction to Windesheim is compulsory for all international students, but you are free to choose from the other options. You will receive ECTS credits when you complete a module successfully. 

Introduction to Windesheim
Intercultural Awareness
Drama and Improvisation
Dutch Language
Dutch Society

Want to know more about the exchange programme of Operational Management in Industry? Check the course catalogue for more information about matters such as assessment and teaching methods.

Read the course catalogue