ISSUES IN EDUCATION

By Jay Heizer, Barry Render and Jeff Heyl

Once upon a time, a book titled “Manufacturing Management” (1953), by Franklin Moore, was the standard operations management (OM) text. And “Manufacturing Management” implied just that – manufacturing applications. OM textbooks eventually moved beyond this narrow focus and became production management, then POM and now OM. However, this is only one of many changes in the field. Here are a dozen more that we have observed in the past four decades. Some are major, others less so, but all have had a lasting impact on OM text content and teaching.

Strategy: Wickham Skinner’s article “Manufacturing: The Missing Link in Corporate Strategy” (Harvard Business Review, May 1969) was a seminal piece in recognizing that OM was an integral part of strategy. Textbooks couldn’t claim that line balancing was a strategy, so topics in texts were delineated as “strategic or tactical” (Heizer/Render, 3/e 1991) or “strategy and analysis” (Krajewski/Ritzman, 5/e, 1999).

Quality: Juran, Deming and Feigenbaum provided a foundation, but the quality tidal wave hit with the popularization of Philip Crosby’s “Quality is Free,” 1979, and Mikel Harry’s book, “The Nature of Six Sigma,” 1987. These works conveyed the message that quality was the answer. Zero defects, quality circles, TQM, Six Sigma, and SPC soon expanded in both texts and courses. After all, Deming warned: “We don’t have to change; survival isn’t required.”

Theory of Constraints: Goldratt and Fox’s book, “The Goal” (1984) told the wonderful story of Herbie and constraints. The process will work, we learned, if we can only get rid of the ubiquitous bottlenecks. Inventory will drop and products will fly through the system, so our discipline expanded with material on constraint management.

Services: As developed countries became service societies, OM saw a major shift away from manufacturing. We began discussing the layout at Kroger’s, processes/inventory at Hard Rock, project management at Taco Bell and queueing at Disney. Faculty wanted service-oriented OM texts, as well as books exclusively on service OM (See Fitzsimmons, 1984).

Globalization: World trade exploded around 1990 with trade agreements, rapid capital transfers, instant data communication and lower transportation costs. OM began to address these dynamics with international examples, cases, chapters and even texts (See “Global Operations Management,” Flaherty, 1995).

Integration: At about the same time, the field of OM was being criticized for operating in a silo. Books began integrating marketing into OM, suggesting incentives to smooth production and finance by tracking cash flow with MRP and including accounting through Activity Based Costing (see Johnson and Kaplan, Relevance Lost, 1991.)

Just in Time: Inventory is the greatest single asset in many companies. Much of that asset is the responsibility of OM, so we began to emphasize inventory…drive it down, get rid of it, or make the supplier store it. We encouraged vendor managed inventory, reduced setups, and supermarkets. It follows that inventory became the longest chapter in most OM texts.

Process Analysis and Reengineering: In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book “Reengineering the Corporation” brought process analysis and reengineering to the forefront. Some OM texts even added the word Process to their titles.

Supply Chain Management: With many firms spending more than half their sales revenue on purchases, the supply chain becomes critical. Some OM academic units now even call themselves SCM departments. But SCM may fail to grasp the full impact of what is happening. Some believe that SCM understates the issue and that “value chain management,” a broader term that also includes a focus within the plant, more accurately describes the concept. (See Krajewski/Ritzman, 8/e, 2007, “OM: Processes and Value Chains”).

Ethics: We learned that economic progress is much more rapid in the least corrupt nations and that relationships in the supply chain, as well as within the organization, fall apart without integrity. But with ethical lapses at Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen, the resulting publicity made ethics a major topic. Additionally, AACSB’s publication, “Principles for Responsible Management Education” (www.aacsb.edu/resources/ethics) moved ethics to the forefront. OM courses and texts now include a much broader coverage of ethics.

Lean: With the popularity of Womack, Jones, and Roos’ (1991) “The Machine that Changed the World,” lean and the Toyota Production System became must-have material in the discipline. A philosophy that includes employee learning, continuous efforts to add value and eliminate waste and that supplies the customer with exactly what is wanted when it is wanted must be the final answer. All of this had to be included in the OM course.

Sustainability: Our planet’s survival requires us to consider sustainability in our OM decisions. The earth has finite resources and OM has a big part to play in designing new products, producing and packaging them, shipping them and recycling them. The literature is just now responding (See Academy of Management, Learning and Education, special issue on sustainability, Sept. 2010). This topic will not leave the OM curriculum as a passing fad.

There is truth in every new topic we have added to our OM courses in the past 40 years. Each of these dozen topics was viewed at one point as the answer to the future of our discipline. Seeking the solution is perhaps the most enticing part of being an OM academic. With open minds we continue to instill new knowledge and communicate truth – as we know it – to our students. OM is an exciting discipline for exciting times.

Jay Heizer is the Jesse Jones Professor of Business Emeritus at Texas Lutheran University. Barry Render is the Charles Harwood Professor of Operations Management Emeritus at Rollins College. Jeff Heyl is Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at Lincoln University, New Zealand. Professors Heizer and Render are co-authors of Operations Management, 10th ed., 2010, Prentice Hall, and maintain a daily OM blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com.