Understanding Rules of Operation, System Design, and Resources
Rules of Operation: An In-Depth Look
Rules of operation are checks that govern how, when, and where activities occur. They determine what action to take when certain events occur or under specific conditions.
At the highest level, they take the form of plans and policies. At a lower level, they take the form of procedures or program logic (computer).
Examples of Rules of Operation
- Process-Planning Instruction Sheets
- Plans Production-Performance Limits
- Work Plans, Programs Drivers
- Automatic Maintenance Policy
System Design and Improvement
The goal of designing or improving a system is transforming inputs into desired outputs in the most efficient, cost-effective, and appropriate manner.
Key Performance Indicators
- Cycle Time: The time required to complete the processing of an entity.
- Use of Resources: The ratio of time that resources or people are in productive use.
- Value-Added Time: The amount of time dealing with customers and material actually in production or service operations.
- Wait Time: Time delay – material entities and customers – wait to be served by a resource.
- Rate Process: The rate at which entities are processed. It measures the processing power.
- Quality: Proportion of parts produced or customers served that meet specified standards.
- Flexibility: The system’s ability to adapt to fluctuations in volume and variety.
- Cost: Operating costs of the system.
Systems Approach
When designing and making improvements to a system, it’s important to:
- Identify the elements.
- Define performance goals.
It also requires understanding:
- How elements relate to each other, that is, to know and understand all the relevant cause-effect relationships.
- The overall performance goals, that is, knowing and understanding the key decision-response relationships.
Cause-Effect Relationships
Cause-effect relationships define the behavior or dynamics of the system and, therefore, determine how the system will serve. They are defined by identifying all the actions that can occur in the system and then determining the events, conditions, or other actions that give rise to each.
Many cause-effect relationships are actually part of a chain in which a series of actions are generated by an initial action.
Decision-Response Relationships
While cause-effect relationships have direct and immediate root causes, the response or overall performance is the result of all combined effects that occur in a given time period.
The system response to given values of controllable variables can only be estimated analytically or determined empirically through experiments.
A control variable is the specification of a particular element of the system: amount of resources, duration of activity, decision-making logic, and so on.
An operating system is defined by the control variables, which determine how the system responds in certain ways.
Response variables (or performance) are variables that measure system performance in response to certain combinations of control variables.
Resources
Resources are the means by which activities are implemented. They define who undertakes such activities, where, and when it is done.
They may have a variety of features such as processing power, speed, cycle time, flexibility, reliability, or otherwise.
Resources can include:
- People-Power
- Teams-Time
- Space-Money
- Methods