Operations Analytics, Start to Finish

By the end of this page you can say, out loud and in your own words, what every core operations number does. What the unit of work is. Throughput, and why a count on its own answers nothing. Cycle time, and the rule that ties it to how much work is sitting open. Backlog. Utilization, and why aiming for 100 percent makes everything slower. Error rate, rework and first pass yield. Service levels, and why the average hides the customers you are failing. That list is most of what an operations analyst job, a technical screen, and a first real dataset will ask of you. Here is what to actually do with it. Go through once end to end without stopping, just for the shape. Then come back to the retrieval sheet near the bottom, cover the right-hand column, and try to say each answer before you read it. That second pass is where the learning happens, and there is measured evidence for it further down. The short version: operations analytics is the study of how work moves through a process. Every number in it is either how much, how fast, how much is stuck, or how much was wrong. One idea decides more of your operations work than any other, so it gets the picture. Work arrives, waits, gets done, and leaves. How much is in progress and how long each item takes are two different spans over that same picture, and they are locked to each other. The original carries a diagram here. In words: A left-to-right process diagram. On the far left an arrow labelled "arriving" points into a row of three small stacked boxes labelled "waiting", representing a queue. An arrow leads from the queue into a single larger rounded box labelled "working", representing the person or machine doing the job. A final arrow leads out of that box to the right and is labelled "done". Above the queue and the working box, a bracket in a strong accent colour spans both and is labelled "in progress", showing that work in progress includes everything waiting as well as everything actively being worked on. Below, a