JWMI MBA in Operations Management

Your career and ability to lead depend on effective communication. Communication is a learned skill that everyone can improve. This course will teach you techniques, often reserved for high potential executives, to advance your leadership presence, strategic communication, professional relationships, presentation performance, and workplace crisis management. You will sharpen your communication skills through targeted learning, practice, and coaching. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to optimize your online presence through strategic updates to your LinkedIn profile and peer feedback.

Everyone in the organization is responsible for operational excellence. This course focuses on the pursuit of operational excellence as a competitive strength. Students gain the tools needed to identify opportunities for improving process effectiveness and efficiency. Topics include value stream mapping, process analysis, quality, customer-focused design, Six Sigma, and Lean systems.

At its simplest, managerial economics is about making decisions at the individual, firm, market and economy levels in the face of constraints, be they scarce resources, pricing pressures or global competition. In this course, you will explore powerful concepts like supply and demand, profit optimization, price sensitivity, demand estimation, productivity, cost analysis, market structures, marginal analysis, the government’s role in markets, forms of competition, risk analysis and pricing practices. In the end, you will be able to analyze and master competitive forces at both a quantitative and practical level.

If you can’t get your product or service to your customers effectively and efficiently, you will lose business. This course provides students with the strategic, planning, and analytical tools needed to meet customer demand and manage supply chains. Students gain an understanding of the complexities of the movement of goods and services and the handoff from one owner/organization to the next. Topics include forecasting, capacity planning, operations planning and scheduling, inventory management, Lean systems, supply chain management, and global logistics, including the regulations and requirements associated with managing an international supply chain.

Early on in your career, professional success depends on your innate talents, how you develop those talents and your initial career decisions. But once you become a manager, your ability to select, develop, promote and manage the right people becomes the most important determinant of success. In this course, students explore two general areas of people management: hiring and positioning the right players for organizational needs and managing people once the players are in place. Specific topics include sourcing and integrating new talent, managing strategic talent inventory, working with HR and organized labor, performance evaluations and reward systems.

Financial accounting is the "language of business." Leaders must develop fluency in financial concepts, principles, and tools to understand and drive effective organizational decisions. In this course, you will learn to read, understand and analyze financial data as well as apply managerial accounting concepts such as costing, variance analysis, forecasting, and capital budgeting. Maximize the impact of your financial decisions by learning to speak with numbers.

Delivery of high-quality products and services with minimal defects and consistent performance is critical to any organization’s success. This course provides a foundation for understanding and applying the principles, tools, and statistical methods of quality and performance excellence from an enterprise perspective. It covers Quality Planning in the development of new products and services, Quality Improvement methods such as Six Sigma to minimize variation, and Quality Control to ensure quality is achieved on a sustainable basis.

Emphasizing the investment strategies of Warren Buffett, this course will help you develop the financial management skills necessary to analyze the competitive strengths of companies, and from that analysis, gain a better understanding of the qualities that investors in those companies seek. You will leverage these financial management skills to become a more strategic and tactical manager and improve your communication abilities when dealing with senior financial professionals.

In this course, students learn how to define your organization’s capabilities to implement and execute a winning strategy. Using Jack Welch’s approach to developing and evaluating a strategy, you will create an effective plan of action designed to achieve the higher-level goals of an organization. You will learn to drive strategic outcomes by consistently assessing decisions. You will identify criteria for uncovering risk, and develop plans for proactively addressing risks inherent to strategy.

Turn operational strength into a competitive advantage. Innovation and agility are essential to competing and winning in a global environment. This course focuses on the role of senior leadership in driving change initiatives to implement operational improvements. It covers critical topics of operations and process strategy and explores frameworks to support performance excellence. We examine how operational leaders must learn to communicate data so that non-specialists can understand to align the workforce. It also looks at how to leverage the proven tools of operational excellence and leadership to strengthen the connection between performance objectives, performance reviews, and team management practices.

The final course in the Operations Management concentration is a capstone course in which students tackle a real-world project to develop an operations strategy supported by a detailed operations plan to improve a mission-critical process. The course requires the use of both quantitative and data analyses to evaluate the business and financial impact of the proposed improvements). Students will develop an implementation plan that includes the means to measure outcomes using KPIs and other quantifiable metrics.