Input Output Transformation Model of Emerson Electric - Operation Management

ESSAY

Working for a fortune-500 multinational corporation, market leader in engineering industries. Its product portfolio has a high level of diversity. It supports very diverse markets; from oil and gas, energy and water, industrial, commercial and infrastructural applications. It diversifies from electrical, automatic control and automation, instrumentation to mechanical industries.

Emerson Electric is a matrix organization taking a process perspective with complex operation model. Being part of the project department, as a project manager of emergency electrical supply projects for industrial applications, has positioned the project management process in the front line, being the customer’s privileged contact.

Project management is an important area of competence for an operation manager. The design and introduction of a new process or a new operation system, and the introduction of new project, demand a skill in terms of managing large projects (David Bamford and Paul Forrester, 2010).

All operations create services and products by changing inputs into outputs using an ‘input-transformation-output’ process (Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers, Robert Johnston, Alan Betts, 2013b).

If we look at Emerson’s project management operation function’s input-transformation-output model, we can see that the process is responsible for planning detailed projects’ management plan; including planning projects’ schedules/budgets, accountable for compliance with pre-committed schedules/budgets and, control projects’ schedule/cost baselines and managing/planning all the activities and actions for projects execution and; integrate/coordinate them within the project management plan.

Basically, the process starts with the contract awarding/signing, which is the output of the sales & bidding process. The whole contract’s mutually agreed terms & conditions; including customer’s specifications/requirements/change requests, considering any technical/commercial/delivery implications, is the main input of the process.

In addition to the contract, the project management planning and scheduling tools, design and engineering competencies, scope management and cost control techniques are also considered inputs to the process.

The process output is completing the project scope, delivering the product/system along with getting the final acceptance from the customer for contract fulfillment and final invoicing.

Moreover, one more output is providing project closure with lessons learned to be utilized by the organization in order to develop the process to manage future project in more efficient way.

The process interact actively and proactively with many other processes inside the organization operating model during the project/process life cycle, such as procurement