REALA, Elijah Raphael M. Reading List No.

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DSIOPMA K36 September 11, 2023

Five Decades of Operations Management and Decades Ahead

The 50th-anniversary article of Management Science highlights the origins of operations

management, its triumphs and challenges, the field’s relevance in the business world today, and
exciting prospects to watch out for in the years to come. With the rich content of the article, it is
without a doubt that there are pieces of information that stand out above the rest. The following
are my three takeaways: (1) crisis brings out the best of human innovation; (2) operations
management is an ever-evolving field that adapts to the needs of the times; and (3) optimizing
operations must not be solely based on theory but also in practice.

For my first takeaway, I was able to discern that the field of operations management
would not be what it is today if it weren’t for World War 2. As mentioned in the article, “scientific
management” became prominent in the Second World War as governmental organizations were
funding research heavily in order to maximize the potential of a country’s workforce, which may
potentially end the war sooner and save a lot of lives. The urgency of this situation guided
‘mission-focused mathematicians’ to develop foundational theories that addressed the problems
at hand, which is widely considered to have been the ‘Big Bang’ event of the discipline. From
this, it becomes apparent that various crises such as wars push the boundaries of human
knowledge and expertise to the limit, as is the case with Operations Management.

Next, another key takeaway from the article is that operations management is
responsive and dynamic, it has the ability to adapt to the changes occurring in the business
sector so that it will be relevant to management and other decision-makers. This is evident in
the regularly changing departments of the Management Science editorial board to reflect the
current needs of the business environment wherein various distinct departments were created in
the past to focus on supply chain management, service operations, production management,
and many more iterations in the nearly 70 years that the journal has been in existence. This is a
clear indication of the field’s commitment to constantly providing valuable insights and
information to entities with regard to optimizing and managing operations efficiently.

Lastly, perhaps the most important takeaway from the article is that the field of
operations management should not only be limited to solving issues and scenarios on a purely
theoretical basis, but it must also focus on the real world since this is the setting where it will
have the greatest impact. Furthermore, an interdisciplinary approach is also ideal as it will make
the findings of scholars more applicable in a business context as it is almost impossible to draw
lines between disciplines in everyday business operations. In my opinion, this is where
operations management has the biggest potential to grow, by actively looking to solve modern
problems in the real world rather than creating models that will have little use in practice.

In a nutshell, the future of operations management is very bright, and it is up to the

researchers of the discipline to reach the untapped potential of the field.