Five Decades of Operations Management and the Prospects Ahead

FIVE DECADES OF OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT AND THE PROSPECTS AHEAD

INTRODUCTION

An area of management concerned with designing and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and services. The importance of this subject in addition to the challenges faced and future opportunities are highlighted in thus paper. Data in this paper has been collected from various literature reviews, publications, researchers work, periodic survey of firms, case studies, panel discussion of experts.

HISTORY

It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the operations management. It was present before the 2nd world war, gained importance after the war and was more into effect after the industrial revolution. The management problems in the area of operations management comprise of qualitative, social, technical issues and their complex mixtures. Line balancing, schedule, production planning, inventory control, lot sizing, automation, critical path analysis, outsourcing etc. are some of the issues.

CHALLENGES

Even though the technology, computing, advanced business trends and practices brought numerous changes in operations management. They faced the following challenges.

• The 1950’s and 1960’s provided a glimpse of the promise of management science to industry, the next 2 decades show less success in delivering on the promise they had made to the industry.
• There was less focus in the problems arising in a broad range of functional areas and more on problems that were developed in the field. Trend such as introduction of Material requirements planning (MRP) systems, just in time (JIT), Toyota production system (TPS) and Total quality management (TQM) started to have a wide range impact on the business.

The research was valuable because it brought the attention of the field back to issues that were of concern of concerning managers. As a result, it is understood that a move back towards inter-displinary research and an explicit recognition of decentralized loci of control and local incentives and hence the re-emergence of economic equilibrium in addition to sole owner optimality as criteria of central interest to our community.

FUTURE TRENDS

Research will become cross-functional in scope, which will require facility with the tools and concepts that have been developed in other research disciplines such as:-

• Supply chain management - like operations itself, has ill-defined boundaries. In its broadest sense, it has come to be defined as the management of all aspects of providing goods to a consumer, from extraction of raw materials to end-of life disposal and recycling, including manufacturing, physical logistics, and after-sale service and warranty issues.
• OM-Marketing Interface: Marketing is the key information gatekeeper between operations and the product markets. Marketing is charged with determining what customers’ value (including cost, quality, and delivery characteristics) prior to product development; product positioning, pricing, and forecasting both before and after product launch; and promotions after product launch.
• OM-Finance interface: Companies have long recognized the role and impact of these assets in their financial decision making, but it is only recently that operations management researchers have started to relate financial models.
• OM-Organizations Interface: No plant manager anywhere would ignore the role of good people management in running an efficient operation. Research in our discipline has remained largely disjoint from the social sciences literature on human resource management and organizational behaviour.
• Service Operations: Service organizations are a large and growing part of the world economy. Operations management academics have struggled with a clear definition of what services are—and what research challenges they pose—relative to more traditional manufacturing contexts. Services are difficult to inventory so that variability must be buffered by capacity or time.
• Operations Strategy: There is a large literature on firm strategies in different competitive environments. There is currently less literature on functional strategies and how they interact with each other. There is considerable scope for research on which mosaics of functional (including operations) strategies are self-consistent and aligned with firm strategies in different competitive environments.
• Process Design and Improvements: Many quality programs have process improvement as their core theme, and the key applied tactic is managing the innovation process.

FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS

Operations management face a lot of problems both in private and public sectors at the organizational level most important problems are e-business, SCM, Production planning, Scheduling, Decision support system, Information based strategy, System develop and implementation. Operations management is the key process in any organizations, whether it is service-based or product based.