This article is focused on the benefits of reducing variability and the role of Operations Research techniques in efficient operating room (OR) redesign through process improvement and optimal management of scheduled and emergent surgeries at hospitals. Issues at a participant hospital are studied which are presented in this article where in the authors develop a three step OR redesign model to address them. The three step redesign was carried out as follows. Firstly, the process bottlenecks affecting OR performance were identified with the help of a Discrete Event Simulation Model (DES). Once the DES model focusing on the “As-Is” operations of the OR was built and validated, it was used to evaluate various improvement strategies. The DES Model recommended one less OR to be operated under current scheduling practices. It was also able to quantify the impacts of first case delays on OR utilization, further highlighting the waste of OR resources in ongoing practices. Secondly, in order to efficiently deal with unscheduled surgeries, a Simulated Queuing Model was used to determine the number of operating rooms to be reserved which would help in better managing natural variability. The queuing model identified two rooms for emergent surgeries for the time period 9am-6pm and one room for the remaining hours. Finally, OR time (with the remaining ORs) was allocated for scheduled surgeries after accommodating various operational constraints including surgeon preferences with the help of a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) model. The empirical observations and results are presented as well.