Operations Management Flow Unit

Question :

Compare and Contrast the three key process measures - Flow Time, Flow Rate, and Inventory Dynamics.

Answer :

Among such definitions, "flow unit" gets utilized mostly. 

Inventory- the flow units in the number being handled currently through any process of business at any point of time provided in the inventory. For example, the number of students enrolled in college or maybe a store. It is to be kept in mind; the inventory's definition is different towards operations management compared to accounting. The patient’s in number waiting by the office for the dentist is not considered as inventory for accounting. Such is considered towards operations management instead.  

Flow time- Such unit is that time amount spent in one process of business from start till finish, called total time processing as well. Through such a process, having a path more than one causes flow time having equivalence to the path length at longest. Taking the immigration process as one example, the visa application here is considered as a flow unit for such a case (Han, Liu & Zhang, 2016). Such would refer to the number of Visa applications in total which are either rejected or approved in a time provided. Thus, flow time here refers to the time of processing, the time taken for the applicant in waiting.  

Flow throughput/rate- It refers to flow units in number (like services/produced goods, money, customers) gone through the process of business at per unit of time (Horng & Lin, 2018). Customers served every hour or parts produced every hour are examples. Such is an average rate usually. 

References

Han, B., Liu, C. L., & Zhang, W. J. (2016). A method to measure the resilience of algorithm for operation management. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 49(12), 1442-1447.

Horng, S. C., & Lin, S. S. (2018). Embedding advanced harmony search in ordinal optimization to maximize throughput rate of flow line. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, 43(2), 1015-1031.