Interpreting operations management for education system

Abstract

Education is inarguably the most fundamental way of enabling individuals to realize their potential and work to improve their own lives and that of their communities. Given the importance of education it is imperative that the system operates optimally. An education system similar to any operations system has the characteristics of supply, demand, Cost, quality and flexibility. Operations management principles come handy in such situations in the case of other systems like manufacturing or even IT. Today different types of education institutions exist to cater to the needs of students spanning from primary education to higher education and vocational training. Several of these operate on the guidelines of the government in terms of curriculum, duration, evaluation, etc. While this covers the vast majority, there are quite a few examples of institutes that operate differently to either cater to special segments or to provide differential education. In the education sector, there are both for-profits and not-for-profits that focus on the area of providing education to make students job-ready. Hence, this gives us the plethora of possibilities in configuring the educational institution. It is also pertinent that each of these forms have their own structure and configuration of operations driven by their vision, values and mission. In this project, we aim to classify the education institutions based on several parameters like scope, target base, affiliation, outcome, mission, strategic intent and volumes. For each of these types, the operations configuration will be analyzed to develop a mapping of resources, process flow, Layout, technologies, scheduling principles and performance metrics. On the basis of this mapping, we would then generalize to develop an Operations Management framework for Education systems. This would then serve as an input to further analysis of the parameters that determine successful operations in given context.