User talk:NavinduDilshan/sandbox

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With increased global competition and pressure towards Corporate Social Responsibility, Leadership is pressured to focus on improving the operation efficiency of the organizations to enhance productivity and performance with a commitment to Triple Bottom Line through efficient management of its scarce resources in a sustainable manner. Sustainable Leadership plays a critical role in transforming the operational efficiency towards achieving its objectives with change management and getting the support of the employees in adaptation to such changes.

Productivity of the operations is measured as the ratio of outputs to inputs. Improving the productivity is an indication of efficient operations which leads to better performance. Productivity can be achieved through reducing the inputs to produce a specific level of output or increasing the output derived from a specific level of inputs (Heizer, et al., 2017, pp. 51-53).

Operations Management Operations management is the process of transforming inputs into outputs by creating value through goods and services. Heizer et al (2017, pp. 42-43) identifies three main Functions of an organization creating value for the customer.

Marketing – Process of generating demand towards products and services offered Production/ Operations – Process of creating and delivering of the product/service Finance/ Accounting – Monitoring the performance of the organization, payment and receipt of money

Key Strategic Decisions of Operation Management and opportunities to contribution towards sustainability are stated below.

Product Design – designed in such a way it could be disposed without harming the environment. Green design reduces negative impact on eco system and is argued to consume lesser energy and resources. Managing quality - to reduce rejects as such waster will lead to reproduction which will consume more energy Process and Capacity design - design in such a way it consumes less energy and by investing on green carbon neutral machinery Location Strategy – selecting a location that does not have impact on the balance of the environmental eco system Layout Strategy – designed in a way which reduce carbon footprint and enhance productivity Human Resource Management – Fair and equitable treatment which keep them motivated and productive Supply Chain Management – integrating green supply chain with inbound logistics from green suppliers, therefore the entire supply chain becomes green Inventory Management – greater visibility over the supply chain can reduce inventory which prevent over consumption Scheduling – in such a way equipment are not kept idling and on time delivery to customers therefore results in saving energy and consumption Maintenance – regular on time maintenance to prevent waste, with the use of data analytics to implement predictive maintenance Greater level of synchronization of the above areas is argued to contribute to achieving operational excellence through adopting techniques such as Total quality Management, Lean Management and Just in Time production which is argued to create productivity with reduction of wastage and reduce consumption which contribute to sustainability (Heizer, et al., 2017).

Management of operations is faced with challenges to build processes that are effective, efficient and sustainable while achieving profitability. It is argued that if organizations do not consider impact of their operational decisions on sustainability and only focus on one dimension of the Triple Bottom Line concept – Profit, it may not survive in the long run. (Heizer, et al., 2017, p. 233)

‘People” element should not be limited to employees and customers but should also focus on the community in which the organization operate. Globalization leads to reliance on many upstream suppliers in the supply chain. Therefore, policies integrated with sustainability aspect such as supplier selection and performance criteria evaluation in terms of the work environment safety of the workforce of the suppliers, whether remunerated fairly, child labor and whether work hours are excessive need to be adopted to contribute to sustainability.

In terms of element of ‘Planet’, operations of an organization need to focus on reducing its environmental impact by various aspects such as selecting the raw materials, process innovation, looking for alternate ways of product delivery and disposal of the products at the end of its life. The objective should be to conserve the scarce resources and reducing negative impact on the environment. Acting on reducing Carbon footprint which is a measure of greenhouse gas emissions from operations of an organizations is one way of reducing its impact.

Organizations need to survive to be able to contribute positively to social and environment sustainability. Economic sustainability perspective focus on appropriate allocation of scarce resources to make an adequate profit for the organization in creating wealth to shareholders.

Product life cycle assessment creates a significant opportunity for a substantial contribution for environmental objectives as it evaluates environmental impact of a product, from its raw materials and other energy inputs till it is disposed at the end of its life. Incorporation of 3R – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to the operation process a positive impact can be made through use of alternative energy and energy efficient machines. For Logistics, using efficient routes and delivery networks while reducing the operation cost may reduce the carbon footprint as well. Management analytics tools – vehicle routing software can be utilized in optimization of the logistics process to reduce the number of miles that need to be travelled and the number of hours that take the delivery to be made (Heizer, et al., 2017).

Human Resource management Human Resource management involves the process of recruitment, selection, retention and development of talent in line with the aim of achieving organization’s objectives. Quality of working life of employees refers to many factors such as fair and equitable treatment, job satisfaction, working conditions, pay scale, management style, organization culture, work-life balance, training and career development opportunities. Buchanan and Huczynski (2019, pp. 13-25) argued that quality of working life of employees has a direct relationship with the organizational effectiveness and highlighted that management need to focus on developing and implementing policies in this regard to encourage them and gaining their commitment to work with motivation factors which improves performance and productivity of the organization. The authors identified that Human Resource are one of the independent variables which management need to pay their attention to improve the quality of working life and organizational productivity and performance which are the dependent variables.

Figure 01: Basic Model of Human Resource Management | Source (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2019, p. 25)

The Bath People and Performance Model argues that ability, motivation and opportunity are the main factors that influence employee’s performance beyond the minimum expectations of a job. Employees must have the relevant skills and knowledge for them to be able. They must be motivated and must have the opportunity to utilize their skills to contribute to the performance of the organization. The model further argues that if one of the factors are not existing it will result in poor performance of the individual with lack of productivity and efficiency. (Purcell, et al., 2003)

Figure 02: The Bath People and Performance Model | Source: (Purcell, et al., 2003, p. 7)

Data-driven Decision-making Data Analytics involves using powerful computational methods to analyze, identify and visualize trends and to facilitate predictions using large sets of data – Big Data to make data driven decision making. Big Data analytics with the use of data analytics tools helps decision makers to devise strategies that focus on achieving better performance with innovation and value creation. Data science and predictive analytics on supply chain management and human resource management is argued to facilitate organizations to achieve sustainability and create core competency. (Singh & El-Kassar, 2019, p. 1264) Dashboards provide a holistic outline of critical information visualizing historical and current data on a single screen which provides the possibility of interacting with the performance metrics and key performance indicators of the operations.

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and automation benefit the organizations in enhancing functions and performance of products, optimize internal operations and external processes and lead to better decisions. It is argued that knowledge workers may also be replaced by machines as many repetitive works of organizations which have been previously performed by manual workers have been replaced with automation in the light of technology development. To the contrary, Intelligence Augmentation systems are used to enable productivity and efficiency of the operations and do not replace knowledge workers. This allows such workers more time dealing with complex and challenging work increasing their productivity. (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2019, p. 81)

It is argued rather than automation taking over jobs it takes over tasks and that jobs are built up with a set of different tasks. While it is impossible to automate an entire job role, some tasks may be performed more efficiently using machines. The reduction of cost with technological automation will result in lower prices which may increase demand for other products or services, and this may lead creating more new job roles. Accordingly, technological advancement in terms of operations of an organization is found to be playing a transformational role in work performed which may adversely impact on low skilled workers who perform tasks in a more repetitive nature. (Arntz, et al., 2016). Frey et al. (2016, p. 51) reported that to address this rather than competing against machines, human resource management should focus developing capabilities of the workforce to complement new technologies.

Conclusion and Recommendations Organizational effectiveness can be defined in different ways based on the various expectations of the stakeholder groups. Balanced scorecard method which involves setting quantitative and qualitative performance measures for factors such as concerns related to environment, employees, internal operational process efficiencies and stakeholder value enhancement is one of the approaches to managing the organizational effectiveness. (Buchanan & Huczynski, 2019, p. 13)

Leadership’s commitment to sustainability with successful change management initiatives which facilitate adaptation of improvements to the processes to enhance productivity and performance to achieve operational excellence with the use of technological advancements and innovation in the areas of operation management supply chain management and data driven decision making will contribute to sustainable economic performance while contributing to the triple bottom line.