Lean Teaching for Agile Manufacturing

Summary

This paper argues that manufacturing education would be better served if a clear distinction were drawn between science-oriented Operations Research (OR) and problem-oriented Operations Management. It singles out Queueing Theory as that branch of OR that has been most abused in the attempt to exaggerate its relevance to Operations Management, but lists 5 rules-of-thumb drawn from the theory which offer at least some help to the real world of manufacturing. It concludes that the practising engineer would retain more respect for quantitative methods if the inherent limits to their relevance were more explicitly taught, and so would be less at the mercy of certain management guns who come into fashion more through histrionics than intellectual analysis.