What is Vendor Risk Management: A Complete Guide + Examples
Operation managers ensure that company-wide processes are streamlined, efficient and effective. If you're transitioning to this role, you'll need to master hard and soft skills to excel or increase your chances of success.
From leadership to product development to problem-solving and time management, these skills are essential to achieving success in this dynamic and challenging field.
So if you're looking to take your operations management career to the next level, you're in the right place. In this article, you’ll learn what operations management is, the importance of operations management and eight key operations management skills you'll need to develop.
Operations management refers to the planning, implementation and improvement of production processes. The goal is to deliver goods and services on time and up to standard.
Key activities within operation management include inventory management, quality control, scheduling and equipment maintenance. To succeed in this field, one must possess a blend of technical, analytical and interpersonal skills.
Operations management has 4Vs or four dimensions people must address to understand what skills they need. In short, they must produce volume, variety, variation and visibility in their work.
Having the right skills is important for those aspiring to become operations managers or work under one. It’s one of the main reasons potential candidates undergo much training.
Here are a couple of reasons why operations management skills matter:
Individuals properly trained in operations management are far more efficient than those without training. They have a better grasp of how to make better use of people. They tend to spend less on materials too.
Operation managers help teams work together harmoniously and productively. That means more work gets done (volume) with fewer employers in the shortest time possible without sacrificing quality.
Helene Dunbar, the internal communications specialist of the in-house clinical assessment program HouseCalls, needed to present data visually for stakeholders just the way they like it.
The problem is that creating visually compelling reports can take time, as they require design experience and skills. But that was until she started using Visme.
First, users can choose from the wide array of free report templates that best capture how they want their report to look. This enables them to focus on their message instead of its design.
Next, the tool’s drag-and-drop editor makes personalizing the report much easier.
Thanks to these features, Helene was able to increase the speed of creating reports by 60%.
“I was creating these visual dashboards in InDesign, and I can’t even tell you the time that it took,” Helene says. “So for me, Visme just saved me so much time and effort, and it actually allowed me to present something more attractive and more user-friendly for the end-user.”
Quality assurance is a big part of operations management. However, it’s not just about ensuring that the product meets standards. It’s also finding new and better ways to produce the product, if not improve its quality.
People who are involved in the procurement of raw materials will know if there are comparable alternatives, if not better. They would also know if changes must be made to the manufacturing process so that products turn out better.
Streamlining and optimizing product creation enables businesses to apply the same principles for creating other product types. This helps them diversify their offerings for their target audience (variety).
Customers love it when businesses provide excellent service. And that will be the case if all employees have operations management skills.
If you’ve had training, you’re far more likely to take every customer’s needs and preferences seriously, even if you’re not part of customer support. In fact, you can help the customer service team by giving them the information they need to answer customer queries.
For instance, you can share your production and inventory data with your customer support team. These show them how your business creates its products and what materials it uses.
This way, the support team can better communicate to customers what makes your product better—if not unique—than your competitor’s. Customers become better informed about your product, helping them decide whether or not to buy it.
To help you present production and inventory data to your support team much better, use Visme’s data visualization tools. Import both data tools onto Visme and convert them into eye-catching graphs.
You can even use progress bars and radial gauges to help make your data easier to understand and more visually appealing to people.
Using data visualization provides everyone in the organization with information that predicts patterns in customer behavior (variation). By knowing what these are, you can keep customers satisfied, leading to more potential business in the future.
When deeply involved with operations, you’ll develop creative ideas or operating plans to solve existing problems. You can think outside the box with coworkers to develop new ways to streamline production processes and increase efficiency (visibility).
You’ll be more inclined to look into technologies, software and other tools that can improve performance in the company.
Visme’s collaboration feature can help you in this regard. First, you need to add team members who you want to work with you on the product design.
Following this process with your team members and everyone in the organization helps instill a more collaborative environment. This allows employees to work much better together and helps them achieve their goals faster.
When you have a mindset centered around operations management, you won’t tolerate chaos in the workplace.
There’s no place for colleagues who do their tasks however they want. There will be standards that everyone will have to abide by.
That’s one of the best arguments for operations management training. It fosters an environment where everyone works together using the same processes to maintain consistency.
Standardizing operations ensures that current and future employees will maintain the integrity of all products produced. This will also keep everyone from making mistakes that endanger their health and safety.
Kimberly, a Wellbeing Consultant has this to say about Visme in her review:
“Visme helped us improve our operational efficiency by empowering our subject-matter experts to create content that aligns to our brand voice and standards.”
Let’s be more specific now. What skills do you need to have if you want to become an operations manager?
Technical Skills
The technical skills that you pick up over time will come in handy when you apply for a managerial position in operations. These are taught to you when you enter the industry.
Depending on the field you’re in, these can range from operating special machinery to data entry. However, there are skills that cut across industries and you need them in operations management.
Examples include the following:
Operations managers play a critical role in product development by ensuring the product is developed efficiently, effectively and on time.
One of their responsibilities is to visually represent a product's user interface before actually coding it. In this case, Visme’s wireframing software allows designers and developers to flesh out their concepts for everyone to see.
Choose from professionally designed wireframe templates and the platform’s drag-and-drop builders to produce your product from scratch in minutes.
After getting feedback from the wireframe, operations managers can get the product management, engineering and customer success teams on the same page to work on the product. Finally, they must allocate resources such as personnel, materials and equipment so that product development doesn't exceed the budget.
To help you organize your responsibilities, you must create presentations that not only engage team members but also help them retain all the information you feed them—something that Visme can help you achieve.
Choose from over 400 presentation templates to build on, so you can communicate your ideas.
Keeping track of data will be one of your responsibilities as an operations manager — this includes sales and expenses. But the most important data to monitor are financials, customers, the supply chain and inventory. You also have to keep up with metrics related to your production, such as accuracy, completeness, security and processing time.
It’s a difficult thing to handle, especially if you’re not equipped with the right tools. So if this is something of a weak point for you at the moment, you better freshen up your data processing skills so that you get the job.
The key to visualizing data is making complex information easy to understand and keeping your audience engaged throughout the presentation. Just note that there are templates you can use to process and report them with the help of big data visualization.
Aside from creating graphs and progress bars on Visme, you can add interactive elements to draw people into your report.
For example, you can create a table of contents section on the presentation that leads you to that specific section of the report whenever you click on it.
If you used Typeform or Jotform to gather survey feedback, embed them on the report using Visme’s native integration.
These features enable you to create reports and presentations that not only inform but also captivate your audience.
Yes, you will be in control of the production budget. Having some knowledge of how to manage finances will come in handy here. It’s your job to make sure that the company does not overspend. You’ll also need to sniff out any inconsistencies with the accounting in case there’s someone trying to mess with the books for nefarious reasons.
Upper management will use your budget reports to create new or improve existing strategies.
You may have to prepare and file financial reports in some cases — either by yourself or with the help of a professional.
But with Visme, you can do this on your own. Choose from its wide selection of budgeting templates to track expenses and savings from a single place.
One of the more important operations management skills is risk analysis. This refers to identifying potential problems that can pop up and developing ideas on how to prevent them.
Issues can come from procurement, production, delivery and sales. Wherever it originates from, you’ll need to see it coming from a mile away. You’ll then have to inform your superiors through a project status report so they can come up with ideas on how to stop them from happening.
Visme has project status templates for every industry to get you started. Just choose the best one that fits your needs.
Also, to make editing templates much easier, Visme’s Brand Wizard feature lets you edit the report with your brand colors, fonts and logo in a few clicks.
First, you need to input your website URL and Visme’s AI-powered brand design tool will take care of the rest. You can then deploy all your brand assets on any Visme template you use.
And by getting the report ready, you can focus on analyzing the risk involved, thus preparing your organization for potential issues it may encounter.
Any manager will need great leadership skills to be respected by peers. You’ll need to be a strong motivator and give guidance to coworkers that struggle to keep up with their peers. Use your knowledge and experience to bring people up to your level.
Making them understand the process is also crucial. If they don’t know why they’re doing tasks a certain way, it’s up to you to make them understand.
Part of your job as a leader will be bringing their frustrations and concerns to upper management and vice versa. So in a way, you’re serving as a bridge between both parties.
Using Visme’s collaboration tool mentioned earlier, you can streamline communication among team members and achieve your goals sooner than later.
Also, you can use the platform to create an operations plan that outlines the tasks you must complete to achieve your goals and objectives as an operations manager. It should also include specific, measurable, achievable milestones and performance metrics to help you measure progress and success.
Visme has operations plan templates for you to choose from to get you started.
This way of working on a project together makes taking the lead on the projects you’re managing with confidence much easier.
Operation managers must have an innate skill that allows them to solve most problems. They’ll know what to do and who to talk to, so things can return to normal as quickly as possible.
If you feel like this is one of your strongest characteristics, there’s no question that you should—at the very least—be allowed to prove yourself.
To help you improve your operational management problem-solving skills, below are steps you can follow:
1. Find the root cause of the problem - Symptoms help you lead back to the source that’s causing them.
2. Eliminate root cause(s) - Ensure that the reasons for the problems are isolated or no longer exist.
3. Inform everyone about the cause(s)- Let people in the organization know about the cause/s you identified and what you’re doing to mitigate the problems they caused.
4. Assess results of containing the cause(s) - Review the operation progress after containing the situation. Did the results compare favorably with those before addressing the issues? If not, return to the first step, as the root cause(s) persists.
Using the steps above, you can create operational reports to document your company's day-to-day or even weekly operations using Visme. They typically include data on key performance indicators (KPIs) like production output, quality, efficiency and cost. They may also include data on inventory, supply chain performance, customer satisfaction and employee performance.
The data gathered from your operational reports can put your problem-solving skills to the test. By monitoring and analyzing operational performance, you can identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes.
In business operations, you’re always on the clock. It’s all about how quickly you can finish tasks without compromising quality. If you tend to crack under that sort of pressure, maybe you need to practice your time management skills first.
But if you’re already amazing at it, any company would be happy to have you. Businesses are always in need of people who can stay on schedule and drive productivity. The more deadlines are missed, the fewer sales the company gets.
This video discusses the top 10 time management tools and apps to help you manage your time and increase productivity.
What do employers expect from those involved in operations management? Here are just a few of your responsibilities if you ever get into this field of business.
Do you need more operations management skills? Want to improve your chances of landing a job as an operations manager?
Here are a couple of resources that could help.
Several websites sell online courses that deal with operations management. You can find free and paid classes on Udemy and Coursera.
It’s good to learn more about operations management skills before applying for the job. Of course, you can also use these as refreshers if you already have some experience.
Like online courses, books are also great tools for understanding the skills needed to become a dependable operations manager.
The website Book Authority suggests reading Introduction to Manufacturing: An Industrial Engineering and Management Perspective by Michel Baudin and Torbjørn Netland.
If you’re applying for the position of operations manager, then it only follows that you’ll need an operations manager resume.
Our rich library of resume templates will give you exactly what you need to stand out. It’s already populated with all the relevant fields. All that’s left to do is fill it in with your credentials.
Visme has a cool shortcut feature that lets you insert page elements by pressing the forward slash character. You can add photos directly from your phone. That’s quite handy, especially if you have media files that you’d like to have on your resume.
Here’s a tip: You can create an infographic resume if you want something more visual.
Visme also has cover letter templates that you can customize and send along with your application letter. There is quite a long list of templates for you to choose from. All of them are so easy to edit.
To spruce up your cover letter, add visual elements using the millions of stock photos and icons to choose from.
Wanting to become an operations manager is different from having the skills to be one. You must possess technical, leadership and problem-solving skills, among others, to help standardize processes, paving the way for better business efficiency and product quality.
The beautiful thing is, Visme has the features to help you become an even better operations manager.
Part of your job is to create reports to get teams on the same page regarding the production process. Visme’s pre-made templates get you off to the races don’t have to create reports from scratch.
You can then use data visualization features to turn numbers and figures into graphs and charts. They help communicate your message much faster and easier to understand for people in your organization.
Visme also enables you to collaborate with your team to create your reports, make changes or provide feedback. This workflow setup enables you to get everybody involved and lets you get more things done in less time.
Finally, Visme doubles as a product development tool thanks to its wireframe feature. You, designers and developers can visualize your product interface and get opinions from your team. Use their feedback to tweak the product design and achieve the best possible look.
Cleary, Visme has all the tools that firmly put you in the driver's seat as operations manager. Sign up for an account today.
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