Operations management writ large

Abstract

Since the beginning, humans have worked, and many have sought to do so more productively. Although one can point to many earlier innovations in management, scientific management has its roots in mechanical engineering in the 1880s from the techniques of Frederick Taylor (Crainer, 2003; Drucker, 1993; Kanigel, 1997; Taylor, 1903, 1911). In a natural progression from Adam Smith (1776) and his predecessors, who observed the benefits of labor specialization, Taylor advocated for the separation of managers (not just supervisors, but planners and schedulers) from other workers, making management a technical discipline. He also sought to increase the productivity of workers and machinery by observing, measuring, and developing theories about the best ways of doing work. Although many of Taylor's specific recommendations have not endured, his scientific approach underlies much of the research output in the management academy, which established a scholarly perspective by the 1920s (the first business journal appeared in 1928) and began to flourish post-World War II. In a development that would not surprise Adam Smith, the management academy subsequently divided into specialized disciplines—such as strategy, leadership, entrepreneurship, marketing, human resources, and information systems—and drew in other relevant ones such as finance and accounting. Along the way, operations management (OM) research occurred under various monikers, including factory management, production management, industrial management, management science, operations research, and decision sciences. 1 To this day, and more so than other management disciplines, OM scholars work in academic departments with highly varied names and participate in a wide variety of professional societies and conferences with diverse emphases and perspectives. Meanwhile, relevant research on managing work has continued in the fields of industrial and mechanical engineering, as well as in engineering management. Over time, conceptions of the scopes and boundaries of these disciplines and nearby fields have evolved. So, what is the scope of the OM discipline now, at the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Operations Management (JOM)? This question is important to consider when determining what topics should fit into JOM, but it is also essential to the community of OM scholars. I suspect that some contemporary conceptions of the scope and extent of OM are too narrow. Herein, I advance a more generous view of OM, one that acknowledges the management of all of the work required to operate an enterprise 2 (and across supply chains)—a work-based view. In his famous book, Taylor (1911) stated that its ambitious purpose was “to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations.” Ironically, this pervasive view may have impeded the emergence of OM as a field, because, until the mid-1950s, many still equated OM with “virtually the entire field of industrial management,” and many OM textbooks included chapters on “personnel management, finance, marketing, organization and general management” (Buffa, 1980, p. 1). By 1980, on the first page of the inaugural issue of JOM, Buffa regarded OM as having finally emerged as “a functional field of management.” Ten years later, however, Meredith and Amoako-Gyampah (1990) noticed that many academicians affiliated with OM still had trouble defining its boundaries. As Hayes (2000, p. 105) later remarked, the discipline of OM does not have clear limits, because operations occur everywhere; they “encompass most of the resource-consuming and value-creating activities within a company.” Over the past 40 years, OM has taken on a wider view with respect to areas such as services, behavioral operations, sustainability, and supply chain management (SCM). Many in OM have embraced SCM especially—even though it is not just “within a company”—incorporating it into OM curricula or even rebranding their departments as SCM. Operations and supply chain management (OSCM) has become a common term. While this embrace represents a welcome increase in scope and level of analysis, it has also transferred some momentum and attention away from managing internal operations. How do our teaching materials define the discipline? Let us consider some examples. According to Jacobs and Chase (2017, p. 3), OSCM is “the design, operation, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm's primary products and services,” and it involves acquiring and managing resources. Heizer and Render (2014, p. 4) defined OM as “the set of activities that creates value in the form of goods and services by transforming inputs into outputs.” These definitions include terms like “systems” and “set of activities” that imply processes of doing work—processes that require, transform, and add value to resources. Indeed, the concept of managing work relates closely to that of managing processes, a concept firmly embedded in OM. According to Swink et al. (2017, p. 1), OM “is the management of processes used to design, supply, produce, and deliver valuable goods and services to customers.” And Krajewski et al. (2013, p. 2) stated that OM “refers to the systematic design, direction, and control of processes that transform inputs into services and products for internal, as well as external customers.” Holweg, Davies, De Meyer, Lawson, and Schmenner (2018) advocated well for process theory as foundational to OM. Although OM 3 has expanded its scope since 1980, Hayes (2000) cautioned that OM scholars require focus and must impose limits on their own activities, because they must spend a good deal of their professional time on common ground. In search of a solution, Skinner pragmatically stated that OM is essentially what practicing operations managers care about, and about the challenges they face (Hayes, 2000). So, what do practicing operations managers care about, and what challenges do they face? I expect that there are many things of which I am unaware, but I will highlight two key considerations. First, OM is often represented in executive ranks by a chief operating officer (COO). What does a COO do? Where the COO position exists, this person is often the second-in-command after the chief executive officer (CEO) and in charge of implementing a firm's strategy. This is a large role, even in comparison to other C-level executives, and it spans multiple functional areas. “Often, companies turn responsibility for all areas of operations over to the COO—this typically includes production, marketing and sales, and research and development” (Bennett & Miles, 2006, p. 72). Executing a strategy requires marshaling resources and managing processes across the enterprise and beyond. This is no small role with no shortage of challenges, most of them cross-functional and cross-disciplinary. Does the current scope of OM research cover the full spectrum of these challenges? A second but related consideration pertains to the work and processes within a firm. What if we conceived of a set of processes representing all of the work done in an enterprise? Figure 1 gives a generic example, where the work divides into three categories and a dozen enterprise processes (EPs). Each EP is multifunctional—for example, “Develop Product/Service” properly involves designers, engineers, marketers, financers, accountants, producers, procurers, customer supporters, et al.—so the mapping from EPs to functions is not one-to-one. Figure 1 does not show all of the information and work products flowing among the EPs, although multiple, bilateral flows occur between each, as well as to and from external customers and suppliers. Many companies have their own version of this model, which goes by various names, such as process architecture or enterprise architecture, 4 and gets explained using various metaphors, such as the company genome or operating system. Typically, the COO owns the second leadership process, “Manage Company Operations,” which entails integrating and coordinating all of the other EPs. Whereas some may conceive of a broad definition of OM as encompassing just the “Core Value Processes,” a COO must furthermore ensure that all of the firm's “Enabling Processes” are appropriately integrated into the whole. Indeed, the COO's challenge is to streamline and synchronize the flow of inputs and outputs throughout the company's operating system. With the EPs as the vehicle, the COO drives the company toward its chosen destination (its strategy). The COO is responsible for integrating and coordinating practically all of the work done within the enterprise, and its interactions with external suppliers and customers. The responses have always been along the lines of “who knows?” Clearly, with the scale and complexity of contemporary operations, practicing operations managers face some immense challenges. Addressing them will require taking a larger view of work, its results, and the processes that assimilate them in enterprises. The process perspective is essential, but it could benefit from expanding in at least five ways. First, as discussed above, all EPs—not just “Produce and Distribute Product/Service”—require attention, visibility, integration, coordination, synchronization, management, and improvement. This will require approaching some other disciplines (e.g., marketing, sales, engineering, finance, accounting, information technologies, and human resources) from a work-activity- and work-product-based perspective, to understand the flow of the actions and interactions required to transform valuable inputs into more valuable outputs in their areas. This is not intended to usurp their work or invade their domains, but rather to integrate with it, because that is sorely needed, and who better to do it than us? As Buffa (1980, p. 2) stated, “we have seldom attempted to deal with interfunctional relationships, though I feel that we do this as well or better than our colleagues in other functional disciplines.” JOM's founding editor Lee Krajewski noted, “Thinking of operations management issues from the perspective of their relationships to the entire enterprise saved the field in the 1980s” (Meredith, Krajewski, Hill, & Handfield, 2002, p. 4). We can view OM from a COO's perspective, as the integration, synchronization, and management of most processes across the entire enterprise. Second, some conceive of processes only as formal approaches to be followed, rather than as an objective, observer-independent reality. Processes exist even when they have not been mapped, modeled, or standardized. I tell my students that, in their working careers, if they are ever asked, “Do you have a process for that?,” to always say “yes”—because if work is being done and results are being produced, then there is a way that is happening. That way may not be documented, efficient, effective, or consistent, but it exists. The process is out there. Working processes need to be discovered, described, and understood before they can be improved, controlled, and prescribed. Quite a bit of work is needed merely to describe some of the important activities, practices, processes, and operating systems utilized in diverse organizations. Only then can we begin to sink our teeth into developing better theories about how best to manage them. Third, we need to investigate processes across the full continuum of work, from purely repetitive tasks like mass production to unique, one-time, novel tasks (e.g., some projects). All types of work break down into a network of related activities (i.e., a process) that is supposed to yield a result of value. Yet, I still see some making a false dichotomy between projects and processes. Of course, there are differences. Project processes often entail a flow of information rather than physical components. And project processes should be analyzed differently than repetitive processes—for example, with throughput time (critical path) rather than capacity (bottleneck) as the primary constraint—but both may be modeled as activity networks (Adler, Mandelbaum, Nguyen, & Schwerer, 1995; Browning & Ramasesh, 2007). It would be useful to develop a more unified theory of managing workflows across various kinds of process architectures. Fourth, OM scholars tend to focus on existing, mature, steady-state operational systems. Most give little attention to the genesis of such systems. How should operations begin and grow, from entrepreneurial startups to mature enterprises? What process architectures and operating systems make sense for a small, fast-moving startup; a stable, 50-person business; a growing, 200-person organization; and so on? What does OM contribute to making new ventures more efficient, effective, and likely to succeed? OM scholars could work with entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners to understand the needs, structures, and flows of work at varied scales and evolutionary rates. Fifth, to what extent should the process perspective—indeed, even OM theory—extend toward the “micro” level of individual workers? For example, self-productivity guru David Allen's book Getting Things Done (Allen, 2001) discusses how to manage personal activities, projects, and workflows. Should OM theory guide and inform individual work (and vice versa) as well as companies and supply chains? That was certainly part of Taylor's stated ambition for his 1911 book (q.v., “from our simplest individual acts”), yet much of the research on the management of work at the individual level seems to occur outside of the OM discipline. For these reasons, I see room to expand OM's process perspective in macro and micro directions. I see OM broadly as managing work to produce valuable results. Expanding this a bit, we could state that OM entails managing work, using resources and tools, to produce results (physical or digital products, processes, and/or services), all with particular goals. Each of these items—work, resources/tools, results, and goals—as well as the organizations of people involved—is a kind of system (Browning, Fricke, & Negele, 2006). Figure 2 depicts the situation. OM tends to focus on the process, the system of work actions and interactions (often including the resources and tools employed), but this is merely the nexus of the systems that execute (organizations of people with behaviors), emerge from (result), and guide (goals) that process—all of which are enmeshed in a context/environment. 5 Each of these systems merits the attention of OM scholars, and certainly the implications of the systems' interactions and coevolution would help generate more powerful and integrative theories. We must double down on Chase's (1980, p. 12) admonition to study broader, system-wide issues. (His point at the time was merely to include people as well as equipment, but the intent is easily expanded.) For example, a firm's capabilities to produce particular kinds of results are likely due to appropriate configurations of people, processes, and tools. Improved operations require much more than better, faster workers and equipment, because how activities and resources are organized and managed makes a huge difference (Schmenner, 2015). 6 We must consider operations as complex, multilayered networks of processes connected to people, tools, results, goals, and contexts—sometimes with decentralized controls—and even facilities, firms, and to OM to such as operations, and other and and services that expanding of across such areas will require working with other disciplines, including management, information engineering, and so in OM that as an or the is that important topics will be with or For example, should of be done only by management scholars (e.g., & rather than OM OM research often outside the OM example, and study of work science, industrial and other areas of management are processes, time management, project management, management, and many other such topics that well within the of OM. of the from contemporary organizations in and information systems scholars may be doing a better of useful about OM issues from these Hayes (2000, p. that the discipline of OM to a that people outside the field of OM doing our many of the topics we have our was more must integrate EPs across functions in can we do the in our own we of our management rather than merely a false sense of past other & OM scholars should the on effective, how can we What should our and focus a practicing operations care about of a when so many practitioners are too to care about some things that they I that we can our view of OM focus on the management of work, a work-based view. in processes, and as a of be more as discussed A process should a result of value to its and how to in process and/or on the of value in a particular which the not entails the value by an the purpose and of good a of of OM on the of operations research, the founding of for the into OM (Buffa, 1980, p. we should expand our view of the work to be The of work to as more and more contemporary operations work. 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