Operations management and its evolutions
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9 pages
Operations Management and its evolutionsIntroduction:
Operations management is one of the three main areas of any business, which are Finance, Marketing and Operations Management.
Management is defined, referring to the APICS, The Association for Operations Management, as “"the field of study that focuses on the effective planning, scheduling, use, and control of a manufacturing or service organization through the study of concepts from design engineering, industrial engineering, management information systems, quality management, production management, inventory management, accounting, and other functions as they affect the organization".
To sum up, Operations Management tries to make “business operations efficient and effective”.
We can say that Operations Management appeared in the eighteenth century, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Two major authors wrote about Operations Management in this time, the first one is the well-known Adam Smith with its as well-known book The wealth of the Nations in 1776 in which he deals with the division of the labour as a way to be more efficient on the production process. The next important person is Eli Withney in 1798 who was the first one really trying to solve Operations Management issues.
The Operations Management has evolved since the eighteenth century, many people have worked about this subject and has invented new ways to manage the resources: specialization, scientific management, moving assembly line, just-in-time…
Operations Management has changed a lot in the last fifty years because of many factors: women started to work after the World War 2, communication and information have known huge changes with the development of tools like internet or evolution like the globalization process.
The evolutions of Operations Management are so a subject that really deserves to be studied.
Firstly, the evolution of Operations Management since 1776 to 20th century will be handled and next the