Operations Management

A Research Overview

Michael A. Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138490628
• eBook ISBN: 9781351034968
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Operations Management (OM) is a multi-faceted blend of myriad academic andpractical disciplines – from engineering and economics via mathematics and marketing, to systems and psychology. To capture the state of the art, the bookreviews contemporary and classic scholarship in one of the oldest business and management disciplines. To offer the reader a thought-provoking point of entry into the selected sources, the book curates its content as an imaginary exhibit, eachchapter a thematic OM 'gallery' (process; planning and control; people; strategy and measurement; technology) introduced by a description of some extraordinary artefacts, paintings, sculptures and architecture.

The content has been curated around three principles intended to benefit the casual reader and both new and established OM scholars. First, it incorporates works that build on, or help to distinguish, fundamental tenets from more transitory fads. Second, the text makes significant efforts to try and balance the gravitational pull of the factory, (even though this may not offer an accurate representation of the majority of the field) and third, to try to keep managerial rather than technical/ analytical concerns to the fore.

This concise book provides a useful overview of current and classic OM research. Written by a leading authority, it is intended to be a valuable and engaging resource for both students and scholars of business.

1
Introduction

Curating a state of the OM art?

The notion of a singular state of the art¹ in Operations Management (OM) is problematic. The field is a rich blend of myriad academic and practical disciplines – from engineering and economics via mathematics and marketing, to systems and psychology and beyond. Consequently, a better description of what this book sets out to achieve emerges from a more literal reading of the word ‘art’: the expression of human creative skill and imagination in the production of, typically, visual and aesthetically pleasing artefacts. Although the art world might seem far removed from OM’s (social) scientific motivations and goals,² it is the process of curation – selecting, interpreting and presenting important artworks – that proved inspirational. Think therefore of what follows as a scholarly OM exhibit.

It is not intended to be comprehensive – indeed the editorial structure of the Routledge series means that although OM has been profoundly influenced by a supply chain ‘turn’, this material is not really addressed – but the final themes were chosen to address the breadth of contemporary OM scholarship whilst also allowing the reader to connect to its (extended) heritage.³ Stretching this metaphor, and to help engage and motivate the reader, each chapter is introduced by a ‘gallery’ presenting, albeit in the readers’ imagination, a series of relevant artworks.

The beginnings of OM

Our introductory, imaginary, OM gallery presents a triptych of artefacts. The first is a small piece of shaped black flint, a paleolithic hand axe. The ‘Happisburgh hand axe’ was found by a dog-walker on a Norfolk beach in 2000 and is the oldest (circa 550,000 BC, pre-Neanderthal) found in northwest Europe. Such a tool would have had a variety of uses, the carefully (re)sharpened edge could be used for scraping, chopping and butchering (mammoth butchery sites have been found in the same area) while the blunt end could have been used as a mallet. Interestingly, it has clearly been shaped more carefully and completely than needed for functional purposes, suggesting someone wanted to create a tool that was both good to use and aesthetically pleasing. This beautiful and practical ancient object reminds us that the use of specialized tools is as old as humanity itself and that many seemingly contemporary operational challenges are entwined with our most basic human characteristics. Archaeologists who study the very earliest societies around the world have found extensive evidence of different techniques for making points, blades, scrapers and cutters, suggesting the existence of specialist toolmakers and, consequently, the division of labour that requires organized collaborative social structures. Consider the idea of human universals, first proposed by celebrated anthropologist Donald Brown, to describe “those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”. His list of universals included key foundational concepts for OM such as tools and tool making (and tools to make tools), division of labour, cooperation, cooperative labour, cyclicity of time, etc.

Flanking the stone axe are two life-sized armoured warrior figures from the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang’s, Terracotta Army (pre-210 BC). One is a kneeling archer in full armour (even the stitches on his sole are visible) and the other a General dressed to show status and identity. More than 8,000 soldiers (plus 130 chariots with 520 horses, 150 cavalry horses, etc.) have been found in Shaanxi province and it is believed that the production of such an extraordinary range of fully realized and detailed warrior and chariot sculptures was probably organized using, what would today be recognized as, some form of cellular manufacturing, with various multi-skilled units exploiting significant levels of product standardization (i.e., 10 different faces, various uniforms, some wearing shin pads, some long or short trousers, some padded; and body armours varying depending on rank, function, etc.: Martinón-Torres et al. 2014).

Finally, hanging on the wall there is Canaletto’s (1732) painting of the entrance to the Venice Arsenale.⁴ Canaletto or Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768) was a celebrated Italian painter of city views whose works are notable for their accuracy. He normally painted ‘in the field’ and consequently his pictures are full of atmospheric effects and authentic local colours (this has led some to assert his work could be seen as having anticipated Impressionism). The Arsenale complex built in 1104, located approximately a fifteen-minute walk from St. Mark’s Square, was arguably the greatest manufactory⁵ of the pre-industrial world, eventually covering an area of 115 acres, surrounded by 2.5 miles of brick walls (30ft high in places), with berths for 80 galleys (plus dry docks and a foundry). At its peak productive capacity in the 15th and 16th centuries, more than 4000 employees (Arsenalotti) – including gunmakers, oarmakers, mastmakers and sailmakers – passed every day through this entrance to work in the Factory of Marvels,⁶ L’Officina delle Meraviglie. It could prepare 30 galleys for sea in 10 days (Lane 1934, 1973). It was a vertically integrated operation with hulls, and other standard parts, batch manufactured and stored as inventory. These parts could then be assembled into a finished product in a matter of hours, as and when required – using canals as conveyors to move ships to the workers. Such a complex system also required the growth of new managerial concepts such as cost accounting (Zan 2004) and the idea of work in progress (WIP). The Arsenale finally closed as a production site in 1810, unable to adapt to the more innovative 18th-century shipbuilding that emerged during the period that is now known as the Industrial Revolution. Today, although much of the Arsenale site is still in use by the Italian Navy it has also, since 1999, been home to some of the Venice Art Biennale – a celebrated contemporary visual art exhibition held (unsurprisingly) biennially in odd-numbered years. Many national pavilions – including Italy, China and various African, Asian and South American countries – are located here. Most of these ancient industrial buildings have only been partially restored, creating a wonderful visual contrast with the contemporary artworks on show.

These artefacts serve to highlight the many perspectives and alternate narratives to be considered when detailing the emergence of contemporary OM. Indeed, as the Terracotta Army (or the Pyramids, or the Arsenale, or the Spanish Royal Tobacco factory (Carmona et al. 1997), etc.) reveal, much of what was ‘discovered’ may have already long been known (cf. Voss 2007). Nonetheless it is the dramatic 18th-century events that initially took place in the British textile industry (Berg 1994; Landes 1999) that are most closely linked with the articulation and application of key tenets of what would become the OM field. In 1781, Britain consumed 5 million pounds of raw cotton; by 1818, 164 million; by 1850, 588 million. By the late 19th century, England had become the most highly industrialized country that had ever been seen.

The Industrial Revolution is often presented as if it were all about engineering, a series of technological innovations, such as James Watt’s separate condenser steam engine or John Kay’s ‘flying shuttle’ for weaving (patented in 1733) or James Hargreaves’ ‘spinning jenny’ (patented in 1764, by the time of his death in 1778, there were around 20,000 spinning jennys across the UK) which solved the efficiency imbalance between spinning and weaving or Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule (invented but not patented – he was too poor – in 1775) or Eli Whitney’s cotton engine, gin for short (1794), etc. Similarly, Marc Isambard Brunel (the French-born father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel) completed his block-making machines for the Portsmouth Naval dockyard (Gilbert 1965; Cooper 1981) in 1808. They were the first to use machine tools to make equipment (rigging blocks) with interchangeable parts and saved the Admiralty many thousands of pounds, allowing 10 unskilled workers to replace 110 people for the same output volume (Gilbert 1965, p. 6). They were so effective that Gilbert found some of the machines still being used in 1965. Equally, by 1850 almost 6000 miles of railway had been laid and William Huskisson, President of the Board of Trade, expressed the thoughts of many when he argued in 1824 that “if the steam engine be the most powerful instrument in the hands of man to alter the face of the physical world, it operates at the same time as a powerful moral lever in forwarding the great cause of civilisation”. Tragically, Huskisson was later killed on 15 September 1830 as Stephenson’s Rocket displayed its pace on the Liverpool to Manchester railway.

Although technological advances undoubtedly played a crucial part in the Industrial Revolution, these changes were stimulated by coincidental geo-political events and cultural phenomena. The rapidly growing British empire, enforced by naval power and military occupation, centred around the activities of the East India Company, provided ample sources of low-cost raw materials. It was also a relatively stable period without armed conflict in Europe that allowed for greater levels of British domestic industrial investment. It is also critical to note how many of these innovations were, at least in part, funded from the profits of the Triangular slave trade. For example, slaving ship captain Thomas Hinde used profits from his and his sons’ dealings to develop a fabric mill in the village of Dolphinholme in 1795. Even after abolition in 1807, trading with the Americas was crucial to the development of industrial Lancashire: “Every slave in a southern state is an operative for Great Britain … and if you will have cotton manufacturers, you must have them based on slave labour” (Thomas Cooper, South Carolina 1830).

Noting the importance of these technological and contextual factors, it was also during this period that advocates of “rational … industrial management” (Hobsbawm with Wrigley 1999, p. 101) began to emerge; what we might call proto-OM scholars? Some were industrialists and innovators but also, like the polymath Charles Babbage⁷ (Buffa 1980; Landes 1999; Lewis 2003), many were observers and analysts of the sheer breadth of industrial activity taking place during the late 18th – and especially early 19th – century. It is fascinating to note that at this time books describing visits to, and the layouts of, various factories (see for example: Ure 1835; Dodd 1843) “were as popular as earlier works on voyages to distant lands” (Ashworth 1996, p. 631). As Babbage himself argued: “Those who enjoy leisure can scarcely find a more interesting and instructive pursuit than the examination of the workshops of their own country, which contain within them a rich mine of knowledge” (preface to first edition of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, January 1832). Critically, Babbage was not content to simply visit, he was someone who “wanted to illuminate his subject by rendering it subject to quantification and calculation” (Rosenberg 1994). Joseph Schumpeter, in his History of Economic Analysis, summarized his skills thus: “he combined a command of simple but sound economic theory with a thorough firsthand knowledge of industrial technology and of the business procedure relevant thereto” (Schumpeter 1955, p. 541). Babbage’s book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, was an immediate success, selling out its first edition (so rapidly that Babbage never owned a copy) and was quickly revised and reprinted. Of the original 3000 copies, many have been lost or destroyed – in part through the curious 19th-century habit of saving the title page of a book and discarding the text. Many London booksellers initially boycotted the work because it included an analysis of the expenses in book publishing and distribution (an improper combination of masters against the public). Perhaps the closest contemporary equivalent is the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) report into the performance of the global motor industry: The Machine That Changed the World (Womack et al. 1990).

For all this publishing success, it was not until Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) established his models for the scientific management of business that OM (type) concepts had any consistent impact upon practice (Locke 1982). This was, in part at least, because although England led the process of industrialization (centred on textiles, iron and railways) that took hold in Germany, France, Belgium and the US during the period 1820–1840, by the beginning of the 19th century – American ‘labor’ productivity was higher than Britain’s, despite its lower capital intensity (Broadberry 1994). Within 40 years, the American system of manufacturing (Hounshell 1984) – based in part on the refinement of interchangeable parts (“the proportion, and relative position, of several parts … are so exactly alike; and the screws, springs and other limbs made so similar, that they may be transferred from one … and adjusted to another without any material alteration” Dwight 1822) – was perceived to represent global ‘best practice’ (Wilson 1995, 1996). By 1850, with some US manufacturers (such as Samuel Colt) opening UK production facilities, a UK parliamentary commission investigated the American system and produced a detailed report recommending the adoption of many of its key principles (Rosenberg 1969).

As discussed earlier in relation to the UK industrial revolution, the American system was not simply the summation of various techni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: curating a state of the OM art?
• 2 Process
• 3 Planning and control
• 4 People
• 5 Strategy and measurement
• 6 Technology
• 7 The future: OM Gesamtkunstwerk or just more collage?
• Index