✏Book Title : Operations Management
✏Author : David Bennett
✏Publisher : Sage Publications Ltd
✏Release Date : 2006-07-21
✏Pages : 1066
✏ISBN : 1412918901
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Production and operations management
✏Author : Chary
✏Publisher : Tata McGraw-Hill Education
✏Release Date : 2009
✏Pages :
✏ISBN : 0070091536
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Health Care Operations Management
✏Author : James R. Langabeer
✏Publisher : Jones & Bartlett Learning
✏Release Date : 2008-05-02
✏Pages : 438
✏ISBN : 0763750514
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Operations Management
✏Author :
✏Publisher : Pearson South Africa
✏Release Date : 2000
✏Pages : 829
✏ISBN : 1868910709
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Essentials of Operations Management
✏Author : Ray Wild
✏Publisher : Cengage Learning EMEA
✏Release Date : 2002-04-04
✏Pages : 456
✏ISBN : 1844800520
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Operations Management
✏Author : B. Mahadevan
✏Publisher : Pearson Education India
✏Release Date : 2010
✏Pages : 650
✏ISBN : 8131730700
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Cases in Operations Management
✏Author : Robert D. Klassen
✏Publisher : SAGE
✏Release Date : 2006
✏Pages : 425
✏ISBN : 1412913713
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Operations Management for Service Industries
✏Author : Glenn Bassett
✏Publisher : Greenwood Publishing Group
✏Release Date : 1992-01-01
✏Pages : 261
✏ISBN : 0899307469
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Key Concepts in Operations Management
✏Author : Michel Leseure
✏Publisher : SAGE
✏Release Date : 2010-07-19
✏Pages : 312
✏ISBN : 9781446247952
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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✏Book Title : Essentials of Operations Management
✏Author : Scott T. Young
✏Publisher : SAGE Publications Inc
✏Release Date : 2009-02-18
✏Pages : 374
✏ISBN : 9781412925709
✏Available Language : English, Spanish, And French
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Book reviews CJ. CONSTABLE and C.C. NEW, Operations Manage. m e n t - A systems approach through text and cases, Wiley, New York, Hard back £10~0, Limp £4.90. This book is best considered as two separate works within one binding, since there is no significant crossreferencing between the 'text' and the 'cases'. A third part, published separately is a 'teachers manual' which is available from the Case Clearing House, Cranfield, can be purchased by bona fide teachers. Considering first the text. The reviewer found it very difficult to discover for whom it was written, and when the writing actually took place. At a guess, it has been assembled from the notes a conscientious teacher will hand out to a class to supplement or summarise a lecture. Whatever the cause, there is an undue brevity and a series of errors or mis-statements of a kind which should not be found in a serious work. For example, a number of references are out of d a t e - J.L. Burbidge, 'The Principles of Production Control' is quoted as being published in 1968, when the third edition appeared in 1971. This type of misdating appears a number of times throughout the text. On a number of occasions quotations are inadequately referenced: for example Fig. 5 and 6 are so similar to diagrams appearing elsewhere that direct acknowledgements would have been courteous. It is sad to see that the authors are either not aware of the various British Standard Glossaries of terms on Production Management topics, or that they attack them in a quite unjustifiable way. Why is it (p. 39) unfortunate that 'the approach adopted by the British Standards Institution is different from the rating scales derived from American work study practice?' The case for the B.S. rating system is very effectively argued in the appropriate standard, and the arguments seem to have been accepted by many, possibly the majority of Britsh work study engineers. The ensuing discussion on the differences between the common rating scales is so terse that newcomers to the subject would be better advised to ignore it altogether. Similarly, the authors generally prefer to use the U.S. term invento~ in the place of the B.S.
© North-HollandPublishingCompany European Journal of Operational Research 1 (1977) 204-206.
preferred term stock, although they are not wholly consistent in this. Typical of the misleading statements is the treatment of the learning curve (p. 29). Wright, and later workers stated that 'the mean time for N operations will be a constant proportion of the mean time for N/2 operations, N being counted from the beginning of production'. The authors show an example which indicates that the unit time reduces by a constant factor. Similar carelessness appears on p. 51, where it is stated that 'The inventory control system is ultimately the trigger mechanism which initiates production orders' which is so sweeping that it does require some amplification. It is not at all difficult to discover systems where the reverse happens, that is that it is the production order which is the trigger mechanism which sets off action by the inventory ~ontrol department. Later the attempts at setting some ideas down on the costs involved in ordering stock are even more clumsy. Without listing all the careless phrases which are used, attention must be directed to the statement (p. 67) that 'the opportunity cost of capital .. is the marginal cost of capital to the company' which is not correct unless the authors assign to the phrase '~marginai cost of capital' a meaning different to that which is usually held. Practical stock controllers will look with interest at the phrase that 'it is relatively straightforward to compute the appropriate value of K (a policy variable) to use in order to achieve a chosen operating point on the exchange curve'. How many stock controllers use the concept of the exchange curve? and of those who use it how many believe that it is relatively straight forward to compute a value for K? It is certainly relatively strai~t forward to assign a value to K but this really is not qu~te the same thing. It is also a tittle unfortunate that three pages later the same symbol K is used, without comment, as a constant of proportion~t~ty in the MAD formula. Later, on p. 76, in discussing the effects of variation in lead-time use, it would be helpful (a) to define the second MAD which is used, and (b) to choose a symbol for lead-time which was not identical to 1. This sort of sloppiness persists throughout the text of the book, although it must be confessed that some chapters are more carefully written than others. Perhaps each author wrote separate chapters? The title incluc, es the current fashionable phrase 'A systems :~ppro~ch'. Whilst realising that it is extremely difficuh: today to write anything without including this phrase, the reviewer feels that there
Book reviews should be some attempt to incorporate a systems approach into the work quite apart from the ritual genuflection which takes place in chapter 1. Each of the chapters are self contained and do not clearly show how the production function operates as a system. The second part of the book comprises 26 cases on Operations Management written largely, though not entirely, by Professor Constable and colleagues at the Cranfield Institute of Technology. It is always difficult to know how to review eases without actually conducting each of them with a number of classes. As far as your reviewer can judge by reading only, they are most useful cases which can be used in a variety of circ~mstances by those who wish to teach Operations Management. They cover a wide variety of topics and should help to give some insight into the working of an operational system. One of them (The Winton Shirt Company) is a case which has long been familiar to teachers, having been published elsewhere on a number of occasions. Most, if not all the cases, are available from the Case Clearing House of Great Britain and Ireland, Cranfield Institute of Technology, Cranfield, Bedford, and it could be that rather than purchase the whole book teachers may prefer to buy individual cases. The set of teaching notes to accompany the cases are helpful, probably more helpful than most teaching notes which are supplied for case work. It is, however, felt that the price of f,4 for 182 cyclo styled pages is somewhat excessive. For teachers who wish to use some recent U.K. or European cases the present book is well worth while. For those who wish to read a text on the subject of Operations Management, it would be better if help were sought in some other quarter. K.G. LOCKYER
Management Centre University of Bradford England
George K. CHACKO, Applied Operations Research]
Systems Analysis in Hierarchical Decision-Making, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1976, Vol. I, 480 pages, Vol. II, 555 pages, Dr. 200.00 (2 vols.). The author's intentioa to write a book for present and potential members of management about Operations Research]Systems Analysis is a complete success. The reasons for this are the persistent orienta-
205
tion to real (or near-real) life applications (51 problems from different areas are offered), the treatment of the mathematical methods (not too sophisticated but not inaccurate, with considerable sensitivity for the audience that is usually bored by rigorous mathematics), the didactical presentation of the whole subject and last but not least Chacko's style of writing. The whole text is partitioned into two volumes, Volume I is subtitled: Systems Approach to Public and Private Sector Problems and Volume II: Operations Research Approach to Problem Formulation and Solution. The first volume therefore deals mainly with unstructured problems, problems of the kind a manager is continuously confronted with, and with appropriate system analytical tools that may help the reader to tackle these problems. Emphasis is laid upon the consideration of problems as a whole and not as an agglomeration of parts. This Ecsu,ts in a diagnosis that is embedded in the hierarchical decision-making process. A formal sequence of problem solving operations, named OR/SA protocol, is presented and applied to public and private sector problems. While the first volume is primarily determined to give the reader a 'feeling' for OR/SA and to demonstrate how one may obtailt useful information, even in unstructured situations by carefully applying the OR/SA approach, the second volume deals predominantly with structured problems. Here the author develops and applies the linear programming methodology and its variants to several problems, usually out of the industrial area. Later he turns again to unstructured problems, introducing therewith game theory. In the last three chapters large, unstructured problems of great complexity, like the lunar landing mission, are discussed. To reduce the complexity, dynamic programming and the application of PERT networks are explained. So Chacko succeeds with an increasing degree of sophistication to present the most important methods of OR/SA, and he always refers to real life decision processes, from simple-stage to multi-stage decision problems. As every chapter is introduced by a Technical Overview and an Executive Summary the reader is informed well ahead about the content of every chapter. Mso useful are the presented problems in each chapter and the answers to them at the end of each volume. The only weak point of this text is the absence of a guide to the literature. After reading this book many managers might be interested t.- dig