Module Key concepts / Learning Goals Release timeIntroduction Four dimensions of performance

Efficient frontierOverview of the course

Week 1

1: Process Analysis Find a bottleneckCompute throughputApply Little’s LawCompute inventory turnsDeal with multiple flow units

First half: Week 1Second half: Week 2

2: Productivity Understand the sources of wasteBalance a line and compute Takt timeConduct an OEE analysisBuild a KPI tree

Week 3

3: Variety Determine the impact of set-ups on capacityAnalyze set-ups, SMEDStrategies to deal with varietyLimitations to variety

Week 4

4: Responsiveness Waiting time analysisMap out the customer journeyPredict customer loss rates

Week 5

5: Quality Analyze processes with yield losses and reworkToyota production systemSix SigmaStatistical Process Control

Week 6

 Final Preparation Week

Academic Track: prepare for the final examPractitioner Track: wrap up the project

Week 7

Final Exam Week 8: the exam will be posted on Jun 17th

COP Overview

The Coursera Operations Project (COP) corresponds to a set of deliverables that students

create over the 8 weeks of the course. These deliverables will be peer graded and qualitative

feed-back from the community to the submitters is encouraged. You can learn more about the

Coursera Operations Project (COP) by watching the following video: 

Coursera Operations Project (VIDEO) 

Completing the COP is optional. It can be taken in addition to or instead of the academic work,

which consists of homework (HW) assignments and a final exam. This creates a total of four

ways in which a student can participate in the course. The below table summarizes these four

ways alongside with the resulting certifications:With Course Project Without Course Project

With HW/Exam Ops Master Certificate Ops Academic Certificate

Without HW/Exam Ops Practitioner Certificate Audit

Required COP Deliverables 

In specifying the COP deliverables, we have to strike a balance between the idiosyncrasies of

the participating students and their business environment with the need of keeping the COP

sufficiently close to the academic part of the course.

We attempt to be flexible and accommodating to the specific business situations that students

face by asking the students to use a very general problem solving process that has been

successfully applied across an array of industries. This process consists of (1) Broad problem

definition (2) Specifying a desired outcome (3) Collecting data and analyzing the status quo (4)

Creating opportunities for improvement (5) Selecting one opportunity and running a small

experiment. These five steps will correspond to five deliverables.

While we allow students to pick and choose which of the academic content of the course they

apply when creating the five deliverables, we attempt to prompt them by showcasing

successful deliverables of past projects. As this course goes through new offerings, a library of

highly rated deliverables will be created that is shared with future generations of students. To

jump start this process of creating a library of successful submissions, we aim to (1) work with

a furniture company outside Philadelphia, Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, and create sample

deliverables in collaboration with the owner of the business (2) use the submission of the

Coursera operations challenge from the first program offering, potentially looping back to the

students that submitted them.

The table below shows the five step problem solving process, including the assignment

questions that will be asked to the participating students, a time line, and a set of tools covered

in the course that we feel are good candidates for supporting the COP.

Problem Solving step Question to be answered Applicable tools from the course

Timing of milestone

Sense the problem broadly

What type of operational problems do I have access to?Where do I sense a performance gap?

Four dimensions of performanceEfficient frontier

Week 2

Define a specific outcome you want to achieve

What performance measure are you trying to improve?What is the causal diagram of how this measure fits into your business?What does the process flow look like?

Operationalizing the four dimensionsKPI treesProcess flows

Week 4

Collect data and analyze the status quo

What is the constraint on the system?

Where is waste?Where is variability and inflexibility?

Seven sources of wasteOEE chartsAnalyzing arrival dataQuartile analysisRoot cause diagram / pareto charts

Week 6

Consider opportunities for improvement

What alternatives are there in the process flow?

Line balancingWaste reductionCapacity smoothing / expansionPoolingSet-up time reductionStandardization

Week 8

Pick one opportunity and create a small experiment

What can you learn about the most promising alternative in 1 day and with $100?

Create a small experiment

Week 8