Your local supermarket may stock as many as 30,000 different products. Each one was manufactured or processed in a factory somewhere. In order for a can of peas to appear on your supermarket shelf, a number of steps had to take place. The peas had to be picked, taken to a processing play, shelled, cooked, and placed in a can. Then the can had to be labeled. All of these steps are elements in the production process.

The production of goods and services has to be planned. People have to make decisions at every step in the process. The planning that goes into producing a can of peas or running a dental office is called operations systems. An operation system includes the facilities, the processing, and the people needed to produce goods or services. Figure 10-1 below shows the elements of an operations system. Managers design an operations system so that all of the three elements work together to produce the good or service.