What is production flow?

What is production flow?
What is job production?
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What is business operation?
Production processes
Businesses providing goods can choose from three different types of production process. These are job production, batch production and flow production.
Job production
Job production is when individual products are made one at a time to meet specific customer preferences. An example would be tailor-made suits, which are made specifically to each customer’s measurements and tastes.
Batch production
Batch production involves making a set quantity of identical products. This quantity is known as a ‘batch’. The batch size could be ten, 10,000 or a million identical products. An example would be a bakery making a batch of 100 white bread rolls and then making a batch of 50 wholemeal bread rolls.
Flow production
Flow production involves continuously making identical products. This allows the production process to be heavily automated.
Why must production costs be kept low?
The purpose of business operations
The term business operations refers to the part of the business that provides customers with the goods or services that they ordered.

Operations is responsible for taking resources – such as raw materials, finance and the business’ workforce – and using them to create finished goods or services. Operations then ensures that these goods or services arrive on time and to the right quality standards.

There are slight differences in how operations are defined in relation to goods and services:

Goods – When products are produced in a factory, everything that happens within the factory, from making goods to delivering goods, is classed as operations.
Services – When a business provides a service, the processes it uses are known as operations. For example, a dairy company that delivers milk to customers’ homes could have a website or app that customers use to order their milk. The company could also have some form of quality control to ensure customers are happy with the service they receive.