Functional Areas of Business

Functional Areas of Business Paper

On our way to analyze the role of a manager within different functional areas of a business, we need to first define what is a manager, what are the different functions they do, the roles among the workplace, and skills they may need to execute their work successfully. Then we will discuss the role of a manager within Operations Management, Strategic Planning and Leadership functional areas within a business.

Any person that is or have been in a manager position will tell you that it could be a stressful, multi-tasking and dynamic job. But what do they do? Managers, as part of their jobs, help the organization by coordinating the daily work, guiding and responding to daily issues and leading a team in order to accomplish the departmental and/or business goals. These work needs to be perform in an efficient and effective way, in other words, Right the First Time (RTFT).

According to Mintzberg (1980), a manager have different roles that he divided into interpersonal, informational and decisional. What it means is that every manager needs to lead his people, monitor and communicate constantly with the team and be able to negotiate if any issue arises. Therefore, a manager not only needs to have technical knowledge but also be able to have people skills, in order to lead a team through task completion. A manager can work within a business in different functional areas. Some of these functional areas are law, human resources, leadership, finance, strategic planning, and operations management, among others. Since most of my experience is within the pharmaceutical industry, I will be discussing the role of a Packaging Manager (Operations) within the functional areas of operations, strategic planning and leadership.

A pharmaceutical company is usually divided in different departments: Finance, Human Resources, Operations (Manufacturing and Packaging), Quality Control, Quality Assurance, Supply Chain (Planning), and Research and Development. The Packaging Manager oversees one of the operations departments within a pharmaceutical company. His role as an Operations Manager is to make sure that the production process run as smooth as possible in order to comply with the departmental goals established. This means that the manager needs to make sure that all raw materials needed are available at the time production of a batch is going to start. Constant communication with other departments, like Quality Assurance (that test and releases all materials prior to use), is needed in case raw materials are not available and a Plan B is needed. After a batch is completed, documentation