Service operations during a time of crisis

The challenge of capacity management is to match supply and demand. During the uncertain times of the current pandemic, managing supply chains, making good use of resources and at the same time satisfying customer requirements has never been more important.

Getting a capacity management decision wrong can bring a company to its knees, and can destroy margins, profits and shareholder value. Getting these decisions right is critical to a firm’s success and effective capacity management can be a source of competitive advantage: it’s difficult to achieve, so it’s difficult to emulate. It is just as important in public sector organisations, and is essential for the delivery of public value.

In this webinar Dr Rhian Silvestro will focus on the capacity management challenges that the current pandemic has created. We’ll consider the impact on variability of both supply and demand, and the changes in flexible working practices that have come to the fore during the last 18 months.

Our related programme the Postgraduate Award in Service Operations Management incorporates this theme, as well as providing a suite of concepts, techniques and tools to help analyse demand and capacity, and strategies for creating responsive and flexible organisations. This entirely online programme is next running in January 2022, and more information can be found here.

With

Dr Rhian Silvestro, Associate Professor of Operations Management

Rhian, teaches operations and service management on a range of under-graduate, post-graduate and executive courses. She was formerly production manager at Mitaka, a Far East translation and printing company. Subsequently she became a Research Fellow in the Operations Management Group at the University of Warwick. Rhian has conducted service management research in a number of large, leading edge organisations including retail companies, banks, transport companies and call centres. She has acted as a consultant to ward managers in NHS hospital trusts, as well as NHS Direct, in the area of nurse scheduling and the computerisation of rostering systems. She reviews and referees papers for over ten international journals and is a member of the European Operations Management Association.