Introduction

Hospitality goes beyond the service guests expect of servers. Hospitality means creating a pleasant dining experience for your guests with small gestures like giving a friendly greeting, smiling even w hen very tired, remembering names, hanging up coats, pulling out chairs, remembering a returning guest’s favorite drink, knowing exactly w hat is ordered, and anticipating w hat the guest needs next.

An organization consists mainly of four functional subsystems, viz. marketing, production, finance and human resource management. The marketing function of an organization aims to promote its products among customers which help it to obtain sales orders. This, in turn, is communicated to the production subsystem which is concerned with the management of physical resources for production of an item or provision of services. This means that the available facilities also need to be managed to meet the current market requirements. To manufacture the product as per the specifications, the production function needs to organize its resources (raw material, equipments labor and working capacity) according to predetermined production plans. The finance function provides authorization and to control to all other subsystems to utilize money more effectively through a well defined finance plan. The human resource management function plans and provides manpower to all other subsystems of the organization by proper recruitment and training programs. It also monitors the performance of the employees by proper motivation for targeted results.

Thus we can see that all the subsystems of an organization are mutually interlinked. They cannot work in isolation. A complete integration of all the functions /subsystems of an organization are absolutely essential for the effective functioning and achievement of desired results.

The concern of any organization today is the pursuit of creating more value for the customer. This value end focus provides the competitive advantage that has become of necessity today. 09 Production and operation management provides the means to explore and implement initiatives on how to avoid waste, how to create value and how the organization can differentiate itself from its competitors. This differentiation has become the means to survive in this brutal world of competition. In fact “Operations” greatly influences, directly or indirectly, the value creation logic of the organization. Production and operation management is the science-combination of techniques and systems – that guarantee production of goods and services of the right quality, in the right quantities and at right time with the minimum cost within shortest possible time. The essential features of a production and operation function is to bring together people, machines and materials to provide goods and services for satisfying customer needs. In our next paragraph we shall describe what is meant by ‘operation function’ in an organization

Definition of production management

One cannot demarcate the beginning and end point of Production and Operation Management in an establishment. The reason is that it is interrelated with many other functional areas of business viz. marketing, finance, industrial relations policies etc Alternately, Production and Operation Management is not independent of marketing, financial, and personnel management due to which it is difficult to formulate some single appropriate definition of Production and Operation Management. The following definitions try to explain main characteristics of Production and Operation Management

• In the words of Mr. E.L. Brech: “Production and Operation Management is the process of effective planning and regulating the operations of that section of an enterprise which is responsible for the actual transformation of materials into finished products”. This definition limits the scope of operation and production management to those activities of an enterprise which is associated with the transformation process of inputs into outputs. The definition does not include the human factors involved in production process. It lays stress on materialistic features only.
• Production and Operation Management deals with decision making related to production processes, so that the resulting goods and services are produced in accordance with the quantitative specifications and demand schedule with minimum cost. According to this definition design and control of the production system are two main functions of production and operation management.
• Production and Operation Management is a set of general principles for production economies, facility design, job design, schedule design, quality control, inventory control work study and cost band budgeting control. This definition explains the main areas of an enterprise where the principles of production and operation management can be applied. This definition clearly points out that the production and operation management is not a set of techniques,

It is evident from the above definitions that production planning and its control are the main characteristics of production and operation management. In the case of poor planning and control of production activities the organization may not be not be able to attain its objectives and may result in loss of customer’s’ confidence and retardation in the progress of the establishment.

In short, the main activities of operation and production management can be listed as;

• Specialization and procurement of input resources namely management, material and labor, equipment and capital.
• Product design and development to determine the production process for transforming the input factors into output goods and services.
• Specialization and control of transformation process for efficient production of goods and services.