Operations Management (OM) is concerned with the processes or “operations” used to transform labor, information, materials, and capital into products and services. All organizations, whether for-profit or otherwise, have operations that directly affect their ability to execute on their chosen strategies. How fully strategic goals are achieved depends on how well or poorly operations processes are managed. This course trains students to see organizations through “operations eyes,” with which they can identify operational failures and improvement levers.
The twin goals of this course are to help future lawyers better understand their clients’ businesses, and to help them run their own businesses more effectively. Toward these ends, we will examine operations concepts in the context of sectors served by lawyers, including manufacturing, retail, finance and healthcare, as well as in the service sector of which the legal profession is part. Specifically, we will focus on performance metrics of efficiency, responsiveness, quality and flexibility. In addition to analyzing the drivers of performance in individual organizations, we will study the operations of distributed supply chain networks, in which contractual relationships play an important role.