Module Introduction

1: Process Analysis

2: Productivity

3: Variety

4: Responsiveness

5: Quality

Final Preparation Week Final Exam

Key concepts / Learning Goals Four dimensions of performance Efficient frontier Overview of the course Find a bottleneck Compute throughput Apply Littles Law Compute inventory turns Deal with multiple flow units Understand the sources of waste Balance a line and compute Takt time Conduct an OEE analysis Build a KPI tree Determine the impact of set-ups on capacity Analyze set-ups, SMED Strategies to deal with variety Limitations to variety Waiting time analysis Map out the customer journey Predict customer loss rates Analyze processes with yield losses and rework Toyota production system Six Sigma Statistical Process Control Academic Track: prepare for the final exam Practitioner Track: wrap up the project

Release time Week 1

First half: Week 1 Second half: Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7 Week 8: the exam will be posted on Jun 17th

COP Overview
The Coursera Operations Project (COP) corresponds to a set of deliverables that students create over the 8 weeks of the course. These deliverables will be peer graded and qualitative feed-back from the community to the submitters is encouraged. You can learn more about the Coursera Operations Project (COP) by watching the following video: Coursera Operations Project (VIDEO) Completing the COP is optional. It can be taken in addition to or instead of the academic work, which consists of homework (HW) assignments and a final exam. This creates a total of four ways in which a student can participate in the course. The below table summarizes these four ways alongside with the resulting certifications:

With Course Project With HW/Exam Without HW/Exam Ops Master Certificate Ops Practitioner Certificate

Without Course Project Ops Academic Certificate Audit

Required COP Deliverables In specifying the COP deliverables, we have to strike a balance between the idiosyncrasies of the participating students and their business environment with the need of keeping the COP sufficiently close to the academic part of the course. We attempt to be flexible and accommodating to the specific business situations that students face by asking the students to use a very general problem solving process that has been successfully applied across an array of industries. This process consists of (1) Broad problem definition (2) Specifying a desired outcome (3) Collecting data and analyzing the status quo (4) Creating opportunities for improvement (5) Selecting one opportunity and running a small experiment. These five steps will correspond to five deliverables. While we allow students to pick and choose which of the academic content of the course they apply when creating the five deliverables, we attempt to prompt them by showcasing successful deliverables of past projects. As this course goes through new offerings, a library of highly rated deliverables will be created that is shared with future generations of students. To jump start this process of creating a library of successful submissions, we aim to (1) work with a furniture company outside Philadelphia, Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, and create sample deliverables in collaboration with the owner of the business (2) use the submission of the Coursera operations challenge from the first program offering, potentially looping back to the students that submitted them.

The table below shows the five step problem solving process, including the assignment questions that will be asked to the participating students, a time line, and a set of tools covered in the course that we feel are good candidates for supporting the COP.
Problem Solving step Sense the problem broadly Question to be answered What type of operational problems do I have access to? Where do I sense a performance gap? What performance measure are you trying to improve? What is the causal diagram of how this measure fits into your business? What does the process flow look like? What is the constraint on the system? Where is waste? Where is variability and inflexibility? What alternatives are there in the process flow? Applicable tools from the course Four dimensions of performance Efficient frontier Timing of milestone Week 2

Define a specific outcome you want to achieve

Operationalizing the four dimensions KPI trees Process flows

Week 4

Collect data and analyze the status quo

Consider opportunities for improvement

Pick one opportunity and create a small experiment

What can you learn about the most promising alternative in 1 day and with $100?

Seven sources of waste OEE charts Analyzing arrival data Quartile analysis Root cause diagram / pareto charts Line balancing Waste reduction Capacity smoothing / expansion Pooling Set-up time reduction Standardization Create a small experiment

Week 6

Week 8

Week 8