Innovative products and their impact on operations

Operations is the part of an organization that is responsible for creating and/or delivering the organization's products and services (Slack and Lewis 2015, p. 2). To accomplish this task, operations has to oversee and improve a large variety of different processes that span the entire value chain; including the design, procurement, production, delivery, and recovery of the products and services sold. It is beyond dispute that managing all these processes is a complex and challenging endeavor, and that any form of mismanagement may result in adverse outcomes that have a detrimental impact on the organization's profits. Yet, even though the coordination of all the different functions that operations is concerned with is by itself already an intricate mission, there is one feature of many real-life scenarios that substantially complicates operations management: the presence of uncertainties.