Operations research

Operations research (OR) is the attempt to use advanced quantitative techniques to improve the ways in which an organization functions. While this is most commonly found in manufacturing facilities, it also has application in service industries, where reducing the amount of movement or number of actions required of any individual can increase productivity and constitute a means of competitive advantage. What is most important is to be able to itemize all the relevant actions, to time or otherwise measure them, and then to re-engineer the actions so that a more efficient model is obtained. Repetition is the essence of such work.

Overview

The origins of OR are in historical activities that required large numbers of people all behaving in exactly the same way or in a coordinated fashion. This has been most commonly seen in the military or in the construction of large buildings or forms of infrastructure, mostly using unfree labor. These two situations have in common the fact that supervisors expect complete obedience from workers and can configure the labor force without consideration of human or behavioral factors. A similar situation entered the field of management studies when large factories began to make their appearance at the beginning of the age of mass production. The first such factory was opened by Henry Ford, and the resulting system of production through separation of production into single, repetitive acts on semi-finished products that pass by on a conveyor belt is known as Fordism.

Fordist approaches required each individual to complete the same tasks repeatedly and at the same pace throughout the working shift. Individual workers could no longer work at their own rate on a piecemeal basis but had to obey the discipline of the factory overall. To make sure this took place, “time and motion” studies began to take place in which individuals were observed constantly throughout the shift to measure exactly how much movement took place, how long it took, and how consistently the pattern was followed. This was one of the founding aspects of what became known as scientific management, most closely associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

The Taylorist approach viewed workers as inputs into a system optimized through the appliance of science—the workers themselves were considered merely to be “hands,” with no right to challenge whatever they were paid to do. This is an approach that found great favor with the totalitarian ideologies of both left and right in the twentieth century. In countries with more liberal regimes, the imposition of the results of this type of OR would take place as part of some negotiation between management and labor. Such negotiations were usually ended when governments declared periods of national emergency, as during World War II.

Today, the focus of OR has moved toward the organization of technological processes in the workplace and the manipulation of information sources so as to produce better decision making by managers. As economies have developed, advanced countries have moved toward the knowledge economy, which places value on innovation and creativity rather than discipline and subordination. OR has moved to other tasks and to other countries where Fordist approaches are still popular and workplace conditions often repressive.

OR has grown, undertaking a wide range of techniques and goals. As networks of telecommunications and Internet users have grown, so too has the need to ensure information and access is routed to each user swiftly and effectively. Data mining techniques have also been developed to identify patterns of meaning in large datasets and these are also used in OR. Neural networks and expert decision panels are among the applications that have been created to take advantage of the understanding obtained. Enormously enhanced computing power has enabled researchers to create numerical models of extremely complex realities and to find the best means of arranging pathways and networks. Organizing the flight paths of large numbers of aircraft is an example of contemporary OR and the techniques employed may be broadly deployed.

Bibliography

Jacobs, Robert F., and Richard Chase. Operations and Supply Chain Management. New York: McGraw, 2013. Print.

Luss, Hanan. “Operations Research and Capacity Expansion Problems: A Survey.” Operations Research 30.5 (1982): 907–47. Print.

Nocedal, Jorge, and Stephen J. Wright. Numerical Optimization. 2nd ed. New York: Springer, 2006. Print.

Simon, Herbert A., and Allen Newell, “Heuristic Problem Solving: The Next Advance in Operations Research.” Operations Research 6.1 (1958): 1–10. Print.

Stevenson, William. Operations Management (Operations and Decision Sciences). 11th ed. New York: McGraw, 2011. Print.

Taha, Amdy A. Operations Research: An Introduction. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2010. Print.