What you’ll learn to do: describe the four main categories of production processes

Even though you may not spend a lot of time thinking about the processes used to make different products, they surround you every day. Every time you come in your front door or eat a meal or even drive your car, you interact with things that were made by combinations of job-based, batch, mass, and flow production processes: they were all produced or manufactured by someone, somewhere, and a great deal of thought and planning were needed to make them available.

Businesses know what they want to produce, but the challenge is to select a process that will maximize the productivity and efficiency of production. Senior management looks to their operations managers to inform this decision. As we examine the four major types of production processes, keep in mind that the most successful organizations are those that have their process and product aligned.