IB Business The Role Of Operations Management

Robot Factories & Sausage Roll Empires: What Operations Management Does

In case you didn't know, this is nowadays quite a familiar sight: It's 6am in Nevada. Inside Tesla's massive Semi truck factory, not a single human is in sight on the production floor. Robotic arms dance in perfect synchronisation, welding together components worth millions. Each piece of machinery costs more than your house. Only total silence - just the whir of motors and the hiss of hydraulics as another £180,000 electric truck takes shape.

In Newcastle, it's also 6am, and inside a Greggs bakery, it's chaos in the best possible way. Fifty people are rushing about - some kneading dough, others crimping the edges of those legendary sausage rolls, a team frantically boxing up fresh steak bakes while another lot prep for the morning rush. The place smells incredible. Everyone's shouting orders. It's hot, it's frantic, and it's brilliant because it is 100% human.

This is a good introduction to operations management, where you can build a business empire in a hundred different ways.

What Is Operations Management?

Operations management is the business function that combines inputs (your resources - stuff like land, labour, capital, and enterprise) to produce outputs (the goods and services that customers actually want to buy).

But it's not just about making stuff. Operations management is about planning, organising, coordinating, and controlling everything involved in transforming those inputs into outputs. It's what the business does to earn money. No operations management, no products, no revenue, no business. Simple as that.

Here's how it works:

IB Business Management Real-life Example: Tesla takes metal, batteries, computer chips, massive factories, and brilliant engineers (inputs), squashes them all together through their production processes, and out pops a lorry that drives itself (output).

Greggs takes flour, sausage meat, 11,000 staff members, and ovens (inputs), processes it all, and creates 2,739 shops selling sausage rolls faster than you can say "meat pie" (outputs).

Goods vs Services: The Tangible and the Intangible

Goods are physical products you can literally hold - a Tesla truck, a Greggs sausage roll, your iPhone. They're tangible. Services are the non-physical stuff - your Spotify subscription, the haircut you got last week, your Netflix binge session. They're intangible.

Most businesses these days do both. When you buy a sausage roll from Greggs, you're getting the good (the actual roll), but also the service (the smile from the staff member, the warm shop, the convenience of having 2,739 locations across the UK to choose from).

Capital-Intensive vs Labour-Intensive

Not all operations management is created equal. Some businesses spend absolute fortunes on machinery and technology (capital-intensive), while others rely heavily on human workers (labour-intensive).

Capital-Intensive: Robots' Kingdom

Capital-intensive production means you've got a large proportion of your costs tied up in capital - equipment, machinery, technology, facilities. We're talking serious money.

IB Business Management Real-life Example: Right now Tesla is the perfect example. They're currently building their Semi truck factory in Nevada, and the numbers are difficult to believe. By 2026, this facility will pump out 50,000 electric trucks annually. Each production line costs millions to install. The robots don't call in sick, don't need lunch breaks, and can weld with precision a human hand could never match.

The building? Finished. They're installing equipment now. Tesla's already got their validation trucks driving on the road, testing everything. First proper builds are happening late this year, with full volume production ramping up in 2026. They've even redesigned the whole truck to make it more efficient to manufacture - following the same design pattern as the Model Y and Tesla's Cybercab.

Other capital-intensive operations include:

• Car manufacturing (obviously)

• Oil and gas extraction (those oil rigs don't come cheap)

• Mining (massive diggers and processing plants)

• Steel production (furnaces worth millions)

• Construction (think cranes, bulldozers, all that kit)

• Telecommunications (5G towers, fibre optic cables, data centres)

The advantage? Once you've got it set up, you can produce loads efficiently. The disadvantage? The upfront costs are astronomical, and if something breaks, you're spending serious money to fix it.

Labour-Intensive: When People Are Your Advantage

In labour-intensive production, your biggest cost is people - wages, training, benefits, the lot.

IB Business Management Real-life Example: Greggs, the undisputed champion of labour-intensive operations in the UK. As of December 2025, they've got 2,739 shops across Britain. That's not an error - two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-nine. They opened 207 new shops in 2025 alone. That's four new shops every week.

Each shop needs staff - people to bake, people to serve, people to manage, people to clean, people to handle the tills. We're talking about employing thousands upon thousands of people. In 2025, Greggs shared a record £20.5 million through its profit sharing scheme with employees. That's not capital investment - that's people investment.

Greggs is still expanding. They're planning 120 more shops in 2026. They've just signed a lease for a new frozen product manufacturing facility in Derby opening this year, and they're building a massive National Distribution Centre in Kettering. But even with all that infrastructure, the heart of Greggs is still people making food fresh every day.

Other labour-intensive operations include:

• Bespoke tailoring (your suit needs a skilled tailor, not a robot)

• Home cleaning services (nobody's invented a robot good enough yet)

• Food preparation and cooking (restaurants, cafés, takeaways)

• Teaching (yeah, your IB Business Management course - this is labour-intensive!)

• Social care services (looking after people requires people)

• Personal care (massage therapy, hairdressing, nail bars)

The advantage? Flexibility, personal touch, and you can start smaller without massive upfront costs. The disadvantage? People are expensive and unpredictable at times, they need training, and scaling up means hiring more people, which is slower than just buying another machine.

The Secret Recipe: Adding Value

What makes operations management actually matter? The value added part you previously learnt in the course. It's when the production process adds value to the inputs, making the output worth more than the sum of its parts.

Greggs doesn't just sell flour and sausage meat - anyone can buy that at Tesco for a quid. They add value by combining those ingredients with skill, their secret recipes, their ovens, and their brand. Suddenly, that sausage roll is worth £1.30, and people queue around the block for it. That's value added in action.

Tesla doesn't sell sheets of metal and batteries separately - they add value by engineering them into a vehicle that can drive itself, cover 500 miles on a charge, and revolutionise the trucking industry. That Tesla Semi sells for £180,000. That's some serious value added.

The whole point of operations management is ensuring that value is added during production. If it's not adding value, you're just wasting resources.

How Operations Management Impacts Everything Else

Operations management doesn't exist in isolation. It touches every other part of the business. Let's explain how:

Marketing Function: When Production Meets Promotion

IB Business Management Real-life Example: Greggs' operations are well-organised, but without marketing, nobody would know about what the company does. The marketing team uses market research to figure out what customers want (turns out: sausage rolls, but also mac and cheese that goes viral on TikTok). They launched a new lunchtime meal deal - £5 for a main, drink, and side - to compete with supermarkets.

Operations management had to deliver on that promise. They needed to ensure every shop could actually make and serve those meals quickly enough during the lunch rush. They needed the supply chain to provide ingredients. They needed staff trained on the new offerings.

Tesla does the same thing. They marketed the Semi as the future of trucking - zero emissions, massive range, cheaper to run than diesel. But operations management had to actually build the thing. They had to develop the manufacturing process, the supply chain for batteries, the charging infrastructure (46 new Megacharger locations, by the way). Marketing sold the dream; operations made it real.

The products need promoting, distributing through the right channels, and priced correctly. Operations management makes all of that possible.

Finance Function: How much?

Operations cost money. Lots of it.

IB Business Management Real-life Example: Tesla's Nevada factory wasn't created with monopoly money. Someone had to fund the construction, the equipment installation, the R&D for the Semi. We're talking hundreds of millions. The finance function needs accurate cost projections for different production methods. They need to understand that yes, the upfront costs are massive, but once the factory is at full capacity, producing 50,000 trucks a year it creates economies of scale.

Greggs' finance team faces different challenges. Opening 120 new shops in 2026 means rental deposits, fit-out costs, initial stock, recruiting and training hundreds of new staff. Their new Derby facility? Major capital expenditure. Their National Distribution Centre in Kettering? Another massive investment. Production managers need budgets, and they're accountable for every penny.

Both companies need funding for lean production techniques, research and development, and day-to-day operations. Without the finance function backing operations management, nothing gets made.

Human Resource Management Function: I Can't Find The Staff

If you're labour-intensive like Greggs, HRM is absolutely critical. You need to hire thousands of people, train them to make sausage rolls that meet quality standards, and retain them. Greggs opened shops at a rate of four per week in 2025 - each needs a full complement of staff. That's a lot of recruitment.

But even capital-intensive operations need people. Tesla's Semi factory employs production supervisors, quality controllers, engineers, technicians, and managers. Someone's got to program those robots, maintain them when they break, and oversee the whole operation. Someone has to make sure objectives are met.

Both need crisis management teams ready to jump in when things go wrong. A food safety issue at Greggs? That's an HR and operations nightmare. A recall on Tesla vehicles? Same problem, different industry.

Operations managers don't work in isolation. They're constantly collaborating with managers from marketing, finance, and HR to meet organisational objectives. Production schedules need to align with marketing campaigns. Cost controls need to satisfy finance. Staffing levels need to match HR recruitment capacity.

The IB Trainer's IB Business Management Activity Book covers:

✓ All 6 IB Business Management modules (5 Modules + the Complete IB Business Management Toolkit), broken down unit-by-unit

✓ 2-6 case studies per unit (some units need more practice than others)

✓ Every IB Business Management Assessment Objective (AO) explicitly addressed

✓ All 15 IB Business Management Toolkit tools with worked examples

✓ IB Business Exam Socially responsible companies (business as force for good)

✓ Platform access with supporting video content

In Reality? It's All Connected

Operations management is simultaneously the most practical and the most complex part of running a business. It's where theory meets reality. Where plans meet action. Where inputs become outputs.

Greggs can plan all they want and rave about having 3,000+ shops eventually, but operations management is what actually opens those shops, trains those staff, and gets those sausage rolls into customers' hands. Tesla can talk big about revolutionising trucking, but operations management is what builds the factory, installs the robots, and produces the trucks.

Whether you're capital-intensive like Tesla with your robot overlords, or labour-intensive like Greggs with your army of bakers, operations management is what transforms your business from an idea into revenue-generating reality.

And that is what operations management actually does.

IB Business Management Key Takeaways:

• Operations management transforms inputs into outputs through production processes

• It involves planning, organising, coordinating, and controlling all production activities

• Production can be capital-intensive (high machinery costs) or labour-intensive (high people costs)

• Value must be added during the transformation process

• Operations impacts and interacts with marketing, finance, and HRM functions

• Real companies like Tesla (capital-intensive) and Greggs (labour-intensive) show both approaches working brilliantly

Stay well,