Operations Management And Ethics

Operations Management is concerned with creating efficient resources for the overall planning, scheduling and control of activities that are involved in making finished goods and services. "Operations management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services" (McNamara, 1999). What is ethics? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it is "a set of moral principles and values." It is a discipline one must deal with when determining what is right or wrong, good versus evil. Why ethics is so important in business, particularly when it comes to the way management runs its operations today, is because society has decided that corporations should have a moral responsibility when dealing in business. Corporations do not realize that having good ethics starting at the top can ultimately predict how a business with perform and if it will turn a profit.

Operations management must continually be improved upon in order to constantly meet the needs and demands of its customers. Operations management oversees all of the daily activities that are directly related to the production of goods and services (Shim and Siegel, 2005). The role of the operations manager is to keep the customer satisfied. If this does not happen, then that customer will take their business to another competitor. That is why it is very important for the operations manager to hire the right people (Management Ethics, 2002-2005). Operations management must maintain efficient and effective processes in order to maintain a good product or service depending on the industry.

So why do operations management and ethics go hand in hand? They must, in order for a corporation to succeed financially. Operations management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal processes (McNamara, 1999). Without this process, a company could risk losing both profit and customers if employees are not ethically sound. Therefore, they must employ moral, ethical, and reliable staff that has the company's best interest at hand.

In today's Fortune 500 companies with all the legal issues going on, corporate social responsibility should exist within every company's infrastructure. In operations