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Operations
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What is Operations?

Operations management sits at the heart of how businesses plan, execute, and control the processes that deliver goods and services. It appears across a wide range of business courses, including strategic management, supply chain management, project management, and organizational behavior. The field is academically rich because it connects abstract strategy to concrete, measurable outcomes — cost control, process efficiency, quality standards, and organizational alignment all fall within its scope. Students are drawn to operations as a subject because nearly every business decision, from resource allocation to global expansion, has an operational dimension that determines whether a strategy succeeds or fails in practice.

The papers collected here reflect a broad range of analytical approaches. Some take a case-study format, examining specific companies such as Gillette, PepsiCo, Lincoln Electric, and UPS to evaluate global strategy, supply chain management, and cost allocation decisions. Others apply organizational frameworks like Weisbord's Six-Box Model to assess how structure and process interact within a company. Business planning appears as well, alongside discussion-based analyses of incentive systems, quality management, and network support technologies. This variety shows that operations can be studied through financial, strategic, behavioral, and technological lenses depending on the course context.

A strong essay on operations grounds its thesis in a specific process, decision, or organizational challenge rather than describing operations in general terms. Evidence drawn from company performance, cost structures, supply chain outcomes, or strategic results tends to carry the most analytical weight. The most common pitfall is treating operations as a list of activities rather than an interconnected system — the strongest essays show how individual operational choices affect overall organizational performance.

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Paper Doctorate
Management and cost accounting reporting systems for business decisions
Management and cost accounting is a modern concept that is making its presence in the accounting and financial world. After the world war1 and during the periods of great depression, industrialists' became cost…
Paper Doctorate
Sports sponsorship and the rugby sevens event stakeholder network
Analysis of Event, Sponsor, Consumer Relationship
Essay Doctorate
Walmart's global expansion strategy and market selection criteria
Walmart is an international company with its headquarters in the United States. Even though it is primarily a US company, it also has retail stores in a large number of developed countries around the world. With that being the case, the company has to pay careful attention to the political and other issues seen in different countries in order to remain successful and continue to expand.
Paper Doctorate
Agility measurement in major petroleum companies: PDO, Occidental Petroleum, and Daleel
¶ … Petroleum Companies through Agility Measurement
Research Paper Undergraduate
The privatization of America's highway system: policy options and case studies
Federal Efforts to Build Our Highway System
Research Paper Undergraduate
Employee motivation and leadership effectiveness in organizational settings
One of the most challenging tasks that many people face in their lives is identifying what motivates others to be more productive in the workplace. Because organizations are the basic framework in which most worthwhile…
Paper Undergraduate
Accounting information systems needs at Kudler Fine Foods
The investments Kudler's Fine Foods has made in technology to this point to automate and secure the most strategically important processes in their company is woefully inadequate and bordering on being a liability to…
Paper Doctorate
Corporate financial planning models and strategic decision-making
Financial planning for corporations is the process of planning the firm's revenues and expenses for the next year. Such planning provides managers with the insight needed to aid decision-making.
Paper Doctorate
French and Spanish naval strategy in the American Revolution
For hundreds of years, maritime expansion represented the only way to reach distant shores, to attack enemies across channels of water, to explore uncharted territories, to make trade with regional neighbors and to connect the comprised empires. Leading directly into the 20th century, this was the chief mode of making war, maintaining occupations, colonizing lands and conducting the transport of goods acquired by trade or force. Peter Padfield theorized that ultimately, British maritime power was decisive in creating breathing space for liberal democracy in the world, as opposed to the autocratic states of continental Europe like Spain, France, Prussia and Russia. The Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Hitler and Stalin all failed to find a strategy that would defeat the maritime empires, which controlled the world's trade routes and raw materials. Successful maritime powers like Britain and, in the 20th Century, the United States, required coastlines with deep harbors and security from aggressive neighbors that Germany, France and Russia lacked. This allowed them to concentrate on trade and commerce, and to develop powerful mercantile classes that won a share of power in government. Britain and Holland were the "first supreme maritime powers of the modern age", succeeded by the United States after the world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45, and the fact that democratic institutions developed first in relatively open societies like these was not coincidental. Of course, the United States was a very weak maritime power in the 18th Century and its navy hardly existed, yet the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781 was the key event that enabled it to win its independence. It depended on French and Spanish sea power to divert the British Navy to other theaters of the war, such as India, the Caribbean, Gibraltar or the defense of the home islands and in the end this strategy was successful enough so that at a crucial moment of the war, Britain temporarily lost its maritime supremacy in North American waters.
Paper Doctorate
Critical implementation issues for GSK's internal innovation strategy
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) -- Successful Internal Innovation