Operations case?

Question

Hi all,

I will have an interview with a consulting firm that's commonly present in their operational practice so I am anticipating at least one case with an "operational" framework.

I was wondering what this means exactly, could someone clarify what makes a case an operational one (generally speaking I think of it as cost and revenue efficiency) and what type of framework can be generally used for those?

Thank you

Answer 1

Hi,

There are several types of operational cases that you may have:

1) Operational math problems. (e.g. Should we increase the speed of the elevator or just buy a second one? How should we reduce the queues? How should we increase the output of a factory?).

Structuring:

Usually, you have to look at the process. Even the most complicated systems have the inflows and outflows

The key concepts that you have to learn:

Capacity and utilization (both machine and people)
Cycle time, Throughput time, Little's Law
How the does lowest cycle time influence the production? (Lead time = cycle time of the slowest process)
How can we mitigate the bottlenecks with low cycle time? (Buffer, Parallel process, speeding up)

2) Cost cutting cases

Structuring:

What is the cost composition and what are the biggest costs
Benchmarking of the biggest costs to find the improvement potential
Process improvements to meet the benchmarks
Costs and benefits of the proposed initiatives

The key concepts that you have to learn:

Internal / external benchmarking
Idle time
Core processes (usually are optimized) and the supporting processes (usually are cut)
Math structures (Frequency of operations * time per operation)
Other useful structures (e.g. people - process - technology)

Feel free to reach me for further help with these cases.

Best