Different ways to run the operations

There are several ways to organise the operations, depending on the sort of business and the type of customer.

Take a bakery as an example. They make a special order wedding cake to the bride's specifications. This is job production. It'sa one-off approach that fits software design and shipbuilding, top-class clothing manufacture or even the services of a personal trainer. It's an operation that tailors the outputs to a customer's specific order, so it generally needs a lot of human resources.

The same bakery also makes three types of bread - each with its own recipe. It makes white loaves, brown loaves and bread rolls. So it makes all the white loaves together first, using batch production. So the bakers mix the dough for the white loaves and put it in to bake. While it's baking they make the brown dough. That goes in the oven as the first batch finishes. Then they move on to the bread rolls. In batch production there's more of a pattern than there is in the one-off, so people can make more.

The bakery is so successful that it has to buy two more ovens - so there's one each for white, brown and rolls. Now it's flow production, with a constant stream of ingredients going into mixing machines, coming out and dropping onto conveyor belts that run through the ovens. A steady flow of finished loaves comes out at the end. This is a production line, with only a few people, more machines and almost mass production techniques.