The four Vs of operations management are volume, variety, variation and visibility.
Volume refers to the overall amount of products or services the business produces. Some businesses will create a huge amount of products, like fast food restaurants, for example. Others, such as a hand-crafted furniture business, will have a much lower output.
Variety describes the number of different types of products and services a business produces, and how different they are from each other.
Variation covers how predictable a business’ operations are. Is there always a spike in sales over certain months and a drop in others, for example.
Visibility is how much the business sees the customer and vice versa. A restaurant or shop, for example, would have high visibility. Something like a factory, on the other hand, would have low visibility.