Innovation and Operation Management

Introduction Operation management focuses on carefully managing the processes to produce and distribute products and services. Overall activities of operational management include product creation, development, production and distribution. Related activities include managing purchases, inventory control, quality control, storage, logistics and evaluation (schmenner,1985). Operational management often includes substantial measurement and analysis of internal process. Ultimately, the nature of how operation management is carried out in an organization depends very much on the nature of the products or services in the organization .In this case, the main goal of this paper is to provide an analysis to the business operation of AB Machines Tools.

Question 1

Innovations drive companies to the success and its not always the technology enables this but there are many forms of innovations in different industries and some of these specific innovations dominate over technology which is always rash as the number one factor.Firstly innovation types like disruptive, application and product dominate the technology adoption life cycle. Then, second suite of innovation process, experiential, and marketing types comes to the force. Later, Business model innovation reframes an established value proposition to the customer and Structural innovation capitalizes on disruption to restructure industry relationship (Moore,G. 2004).In AB innovations like product, application, process, experimental, marketing and structural were highlighted for over many years.

Product and application Innovation: Product innovation is crucial for a firm to get a competitive advantage in the business. AB machine tools used the Product innovation, Asquith-Butler designers and senior management followed technological developments and continuously redesigned their products to exploits new technology. For example, Asquith radial drills and Butler shaping machines were produced