Operations Management 1

Saudi Aramco is a national petroleum and natural gas company, and is based in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Aramco must be concerned with many of the supply chain issues mentioned in Chapter One of your text. Each of the issues could have an impact on Aramco’s operations, causing inventory issues, late deliveries, or quality concerns.
Examine Aramco’s business Model. Pick one of the following issues, and describe how Aramco is specifically impacted, and how the company may overcome the issue:
1. The need to improve operations
2. Increasing levels of outsourcing
3. Increasing transportation costs
4. Competitive pressures
5. Increasing globalization
6. Increasing importance of e-business
7. The complexity of supply chain
8. The need to manage inventories
Each of the issues listed in your discussion prompt could have an impact on Aramco’s operations, causing inventory issues, late deliveries, or quality concerns, and negatively impacting productivity. Productivity can be defined as the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output of some category of goods divided by the total input of, say, labor or raw materials (Ravi, 2015). We will learn more about productivity through the term, but consider how the list impacts Aramco’s productivity.