Operational Research in Industry — A Survey

Management of industrial enterprises increasingly means decision making under complex and often confusing circumstances. Economies in the free world have changed from a type in which every product quickly would find a customer, to a type where markets are fragmented and populated with well- organized and demanding customers whose tastes may change from one day to the other. Governmental rules, both caused by international integration and by an increasing care for the “environment”, are becoming ever more impeding. Science, more in particular operational research, mathematics and informatics, has produced tools to support the decision maker in his difficult task. This paper gives an overview of recent results. It contains examples of OR applications in a large multi-national company. Logistics play an important part in the examples: the loading of vehicles with large rectangular boxes; the calculation of the required number of vehicles to transport a given amount of boxes; the management of service parts for a vast range of consumer products. Furthermore, the paper discusses the conditions that have to be satisfied in order to successfully use OR in practice. A “project-based approach” with strong involvement of the client organization has turned out to be of paramount importance. The steps to be taken in such a project are briefly described: (1) a preliminary investigation to define the problem and generate ideas for its solution; (2) the main body of activities to work out the selected solutions, compare them and make recommendations for a choice and its implementaiton; (3) the implementation itself. The profile of the OR-worker, the pitfalls to avoid and the difficulties that he or she to solve, will get some attention also.