Operations Strategy

Catalog description

The goal of this course is to teach students how to make strategic decisions that are grounded in operational reality. We study how to build and evaluate the “operating system” of the firm to maximize value. This involves tailoring the firm’s operational competencies, assets, and processes to a specific business strategy. The course provides students with a framework to 1) formulate an operations strategy and 2) analyze, value, and optimize the key decisions involved in operations strategy. Our key evaluation metric will be how operations strategy impacts the net present value and risk exposure of the firm. The key decisions studied are evaluating competitive operational competencies and benchmarking; capacity expansion, timing, flexibility, and location; sourcing and supply management; risk management and operational hedging; improvement, innovation, and learning.