The impact of poor production and inventory planning can be significant in any manufacturing firm. On an aggregate level, excessive inventories can lead to poor cash flows necessitating financing to cover operational costs while stock outs can lead to customer service problems and the eventual...

The National Science Foundation established the Decision and Management Sciences Program (DMS) in 1982. Healthy and growing, DMS is likely to affect OR/MS significantly, not only by providing funds for basic research, but also through its vision of a combined theoretical and empirical science of...

A manager tries to put together the various resources under his control into an activity that achieves his objectives. A model of his operation can assist him but probably will not unless it meets certain requirements. A model that is to be used by a manager should be simple, robust, easy to...

(This article originally appeared in Management Science, April 1970, Volume 16, Number 8, pp. B-466--B-485, published by The Institute of Management Sciences.) A manager tries to put together the various resources under his control into an activity that achieves his objectives. A model of his...

Managerial models for practice have undergone remarkable growth in the past 50 years. My paper on decision calculus, published in 1970, was both a progress report and a prescription for improvement. This commentary describes why I wrote the paper, my perception of why it has been considered...

The first major experimental comparison of approval voting with regular plurality voting occurred in the 1985 annual election of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS). In approval voting a person votes for (approves of) as many candidates as desired, the winner being the candidate with the...