"Variability hurts. It degrades service quality and increases operational costs." — the recurring lesson across queueing and inventory

"Improving non-bottleneck resources does not increase capacity." — the foundational lesson of process analysis

What this masterclass is

A technique-focused playbook synthesized from Vanderbilt Owen's MGT 6371 Operations Management (Fall 2024, Professor Mümin Kurtuluş): 3 lecture decks, the Operations Management Reading: Process Analysis, the canonical Kristen's Cookie Co. case, the Barilla SpA case (the canonical supply-chain coordination case), 5 practice-problem sets with solutions (process analysis, queueing ×2, inventory, final exam booklet), and Excel queueing/inventory templates.

Where the prior masterclasses in your library cover strategy, consulting craft, and managerial behavior, this one covers the quantitative discipline of running operations. It's the most numerical of the six. Worked examples and formulas dominate. Master this and you have the operational toolkit any general manager needs to make defensible decisions about capacity, waiting, and inventory.

If you read it cover-to-cover, expect ~4–6 hours. Treat it as reference and you'll return to it whenever a quantitative ops question comes up.

How to use it

First pass (45 minutes): Read this page, then skim each module's opening section and cheat sheet (the formulas live there). You'll come away with a mental map of the three pillars (process, queueing, inventory) and how they connect.

Deep-read pass (per topic): When you face a real question — what's our bottleneck?, how many servers do we need?, what's our reorder point? — pull the relevant module. Each ends with a problem-solving cheat sheet.

Practice-problem pass: The Master Playbook (Module 8) lists problem types and where to find practice. The course's practice problem sets are still in your source folder; this masterclass gives you the framework to attack them.

The 7 modules + Master Playbook

1. Foundations of Operations Management — inputs/firm/outputs framing, MTO vs. MTS, the three pillars, why variability is the unifying enemy
2. Process Analysis I: Capacity, Throughput, and the Bottleneck — process flow diagrams, terminology, capacity calculation, batch sizes, setup times
3. Process Analysis II: Kristen's Cookie Co. Worked End-to-End — the canonical case fully solved, plus process improvement principles
4. Queueing Theory — Little's Law, utilization, the M/M/c approximation, variability + utilization → wait, psychology of waiting, management levers
5. Inventory Management I: EOQ — the Economic Order Quantity model under perfect demand, reorder points, total cost minimization
6. Inventory Management II: Demand Uncertainty — safety stock, service-level / availability, z-tables, the reorder-point formula under randomness
7. Integrated Operations & The Barilla Case — the bullwhip effect, JITD (Just-In-Time Distribution), supply-chain coordination, why operational change is also organizational change
8. The Master Playbook — formula reference, problem-type → framework lookup, the 5 things to remember

Decisions → Frameworks lookup (start here in a hurry)