How organizations function successfully within society and a particular industry depends
solely on the management of day-to-day operations. Operations management encompasses
various related activities but its focus is on carefully managing the day-to-day processes of
an organization to produce and distribute its services and/or products. Major activities that
are related to operations management include: product creation, purchasing, development,
production, inventory control, and distribution. Its strategy is to optimize design,
operation, and improvement of decision making while reducing operational cost and
expenses and improving efficiency (UOP, 2006).
A great deal of operational management focus is to measure and analyze an organization
internal processes. Often times ethical issues come into play when attempting to measure,
analyze, and improve internally. Ethical issues can be very challenging to an organization
management when the organization is comprised of individuals with differing ethical
beliefs. It is because of this that it becomes vital for an organization to establish basic
ethical principles. Even with ethical principles in place, uncontrollable situations may
occur in the day-to-day operations.
In the long-term care industry individuals are responsible for the well-being of their
patients. Consider this following example: At a nursing home where individuals live and
depend on others to care for them 24 hours a day, a family had reported to administration
they witnessed a couple of employees using illegal substances on company property then
returning to work. After careful investigation of this allegation administration decided to
implement a random drug screening to all current employees including mandatory drug