Operations Management (A Level)

• Location (local, national, international) and scale: economies and diseconomies of scale.
• Quality control vs quality assurance; TQM; benchmarking.
• Operations strategy: IT and AI, ERP, lean production (kaizen, quality circles, cell production, JIT), project management and critical path analysis.

Where and how big

Location decisions weigh quantitative factors (costs, revenues) and qualitative ones (labour skills, infrastructure). Economies of scale cut average cost as output grows; diseconomies (communication, motivation) raise it.

Control vs assurance

Quality control inspects finished output; quality assurance builds quality into every stage; TQM makes quality everyone's responsibility.

Lean production and critical path

Critical path analysis finds the longest path of dependent activities; activities on it have zero total float. Total float = latest finish − earliest start − duration.