In operations, in inevitability, you will be asked certain for certain numbers or statistics about your program by various people.
Operations managers need to have a fundamental understanding of their business operation and the basic operational numbers memorized.
Keith A. Beaulieu, MBA, BS, BA, CHSOS
In my opinion, everyone in operations should know how many participants they had the previous year, total participant hours, total hours, what percentage of the hours are actual operations vs. administrative or preparation time, and what the overall utilization of the staff and facility was last year.
There are times when I can guarantee that you will get questions about numbers and statistics of your center:
- When you least expect it…. like a chance meeting with your Dean or CFO in the elevator
- Director’s meetings
- Finance/budget meetings
- Scheduling meetings
- Tours
- E-mail or phone query from other operations managers
As an operations manager or even a coordinator, you should have the basic statistics and numbers memorized. No….you do not need to carry your spread sheets around with you all the time, but you need to be able to generalize and then be able to fetch the data rather quickly.
This is an example that happened to me recently when I had a chance meeting with the finance manager:
“Keith, how are your numbers looking with all the new School of Nursing simulations being added this year?”
My answer: “Overall our total simulation hours are down a bit from last year and that is being reflected in the center utilization. Surprisingly, since the SON simulations were added, it added about 9% more time, their total hour utilization of the center is on par with the residency program at about 16%. I can shoot you the actual numbers when I get back to my office. “
Your conversations will vary depending on the audience, your finance people are going to want to know how your utilization impacts your payroll and budget; whereas, someone on a tour will just want to know how many learners get trained per year or how much was the manikin. Either way, its a good idea to have a general knowledge about the business you are “running.”
Sometimes, your organization will dictate what they want to see and how they want to see it formatted. This is a good thing overall, because it cuts down on things you need to track. I will caution you though, just because you aren’t required to track it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what is going on.
In the textbook, Defining Excellence in Simulation Programs, they list four (4) basic data points that almost everyone can collate in their simulation programs:
- Total number of sessions
- Total participants
- Total room hours
- Total participant hours
These four pieces of data are a good start; start with those and build upon that data once you figure out what your stakeholders want to see.
And finally, as is true with all data, the one data point itself may not be particularly useful. It is many data points over the years that produces a trend that is important for operations. I’ll talk about that in a different post.
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