Operational Planning and Control: Focusing on Human Behavior
Instigating control involves monitoring and adapting corrective actions (whenever necessary) of the operations to guarantee that plans and objectives are being met. Operational control is evident in several forms such as quality, stock, order processing, cost/budgeting, automation and people and labour productivity. On the other hand, the gamut of operational planning encompasses operational, aggregate and capacity stages. As such, operational planning and control considers monitoring and correction of routinal activities versus the plan itself to meeting demands and monitoring facilities and resources inputs up to two years ahead to strategic processing up to five years ahead and more. Every stage requires differing levels of planning, controlling and monitoring and therefore varying degrees of human competence, expertise and behaviour.
Queueing psychology or the recognition of human nature in the management of each operation in every level is critical as there is a need to align human behavioral model to specific functions. To wit, in carrying out the functions of planning, organising, scheduling, controlling and monitoring, the people responsible should concern how their actions could affect human behaviour for the purpose of ensuring that the desired level of craftsmen satisfaction would be maintained and achieved. Where decision-making and uncertainties are involved, then there is the greater necessity to understand how operational planners and controllers can make use of human skills and knowledge as well as competence, expertise and behaviour.
The paradox is that despite the wide-integration of computer systems in operational planning and controlling, there would always be the reactive human involvement that impact naturalistic decision-making, bottleneck management, distributed cognition and situational awareness. Reactive human behaviours greatly affect the overall performance of the operation in three stages: the first is on capacity management where it could jeopardise the maintenance of large capacity cushion, second is on non-feasibility of operation planning to meet demand or the agreed output due to scheduling complexities and third is on insufficiency of critical path method (CPM) as evident in the mismanagement of bottlenecks.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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