Is operations management course to be delivered as operations research curriculum only...???

Hello Dear,

They are not same.

One of the important areas of operation management is optimization. Operation research (OR) is a tool that can help people to achieve an optimized condition in a operating system (e.g. company, organization, supply chain...).

OR compromises a very vast area but it needs to be combined with OM principles to work more properly.

Operations research  aims at obtaining best possible solution whereas Operations management aims at non-value-adding activities/inventory elimination/reduction.

Thanks for all the reply. But here is the catch. There is a difference in approach in the OM class by OR professors and Professors who had applied the technique in the Business Situations. Ops Res professors may need to impart more situations and come to the ground level and make it so interesting ... and More over, they need to come out of the concept of OR = OM.  Definitely,  both need the separate mode of the delivery. OR - can be applied to any field where the optimization and improvements are required.  OM - need to be observed by the upcoming mangers, how to react to the business situations diligently in the processes and how should we make decisions out of it. To me, OR  is more of developing  and using the variants of the technique, on the other hand OM is the pure application of that.  But is unhealthy to say that OM professionals should know only OR.

OR is normally taught in the School of Economics while OM is normally taught in the Business School (at least in my university this is the case). Perhaps that gives you some indication about the different foci of the two subjects. It also seems to be corresponding to your own summary.

Operation research works on the real life problems using the various optimization technique, on the other hand Operation managements deals with the model in the business management also related statistical data. 

There is considerable overlap between the two fields, but in general, Operations Research (OR) is a little more Mathematical, whereas operations management (OM) exhibits psychosocial and socio-technical considerations. OR requires use mathematics  to model a real world problem and find an optimal solution for it. But, OM is mainly concerned with the managing of production  resources critical to competitiveness of a company, sometimes by using the OR techniques (aggregate planning, scheduling, inventory control....etc)

I agree with Mohammed Othman.

Personally I have been teaching Operations Management in Management Schools in the UK, Seychelles and nowadays Namibia, over the past fifteen years or so.

The previous contributors are correct in indicating that OR is from the mathematical school. The hard number crunching approach will add and aid the technical dimensions of operations improvements. For example the actual measurement and exact specifications necessary for a production line to be made more effective and efficient.

Operations Managers need to be able to balance the right amount of technical application with successful management of the problem.

My favourite text is Operations Management by Nigel Slack et Al. it has the right amount of management theory with great real-life and current case study support.

The difference between both terms is the purpose of the science or courses. OR aims to answer or provides the best solution as a pure solid science ,while MO works as a bridge between OR and business.

In other words, the OM has social constraints and it has to consider them when it searches for a solution.Those constraints drive toward the possible solutions more than the optimal ones.

I agree with Abdalla Garguri that in Operations Management, we may consider possible solutions other than optimum one because of constraints (after carrying out feasibility analysis).

I see some of the answers which are quite appropriate to the questions. But in teaching structure of the curriculum depends largely on the instructor. Operations research is itself applied to operations and operations management is definitely so. In operations management we may include some concepts of costing, economics, and cost estimation itself. However, a part of the course has to include some operations research.

nand

I've been teaching Operations management at Bocconi University and at its School of Management for many years. In almost all MBAs and management courses this topics is presented as relevant part of the curriculum of studies.  The origin of our discipline is Operations research, but the quantitative tools and approaches developed in OR are integrated into a brodear  management perspective. 

OM must have a managerial focus with solutions which may not be optimum BUT feasible and easy to implement. In OR we may be concerned about analytical focus with optimality  at  the center stage, whereas in OM, the tilt is towards implementation.

Definitely not! Two, of many, issues:

1. Operations management in its essence is the management of business processes. This subject basically concerns the interaction of humans, technology, and information.

2. Take forecasting for just one example. We teach students to understand the basic business forces that underlie plots of past data. Then to verify those forces through interaction with internal and external managers. Picking the correct model for forecasting is then a relatively easy issue.

Too many OR specialists accept computers as black boxes that deliver the best answers.

In my opinion It's "NO".  A teacher who is having  sound understanding of the OR can deliver OM course more effectively. I have been teaching this course from last 12 years and I always sensitize the students to feel the Importance of OM in Managerial decision Making process to create the value to the products/services. Ultimately an MBA student understand the following to get the real taste of OM:

The above items require logical understanding. Finally I would say OR is different and OM is different. 

- In a nutshell, OR is more mathematically focused while OM is more managerially focused. It is a similar view expressed by Prof Deshmukh as well. Because I have studied OR a few decades ago and OM in the past (within the last two decades, and teaching it now), I can convincingly express this view.

I've discovered through my years as an applied mathematician in the real-world of business/industry that often the greatest use of a mathematical model/optimization is that it leads to a reformulation of the problem to ensure that it accurately represents the decision problem. In this case, there are clearly 'unaddressed practicality constraints' that are not part of the optimization problem that is being solved. The purist-applied math answer would be to reformulate the OR problem to include these constraints and figure out how to solve it. Alternatively, "practicality", if quantified adequately, can be a separate objective, and techniques from multicriteria optimization such as the ones discussed in my Ph.D. thesis can be used to generate a set of possible alternatives that  trade off between "optimality" and "practicality".

Operations Management and research Methodology these two are entirely different courses. You cannot  mix them.  Both have to be taught separately

Courses within the broader context of education are like countries on our planet - demarcated by artificial boundaries of politics, culture and language - but ultimately part of one large unified theme. 

My take is that OM and OR are entirely different from each other - like apples and oranges. Operations Research developed under the efforts of military operational improvements during WW II and got absorbed in business analysis especially in the area of operations initially. Whereas Operations Management has been developing right from the 20th century beginning as a separate discipline starting with scientific management of Frederick Taylor and manufacturing operations and growing into operations strategy through the efforts of Skinner and others. Today we talk of including service operations also in the analysis and study of operations. OM is benefitted by O.R. which provides a quantitative - mathematical basis  and techniques for analysing the operations. As rightly mentioned by previous contributors, O.R. is primarily rooted in mathematics and its applications to business have extended much beyond Operations and O.R. and quantitative modeling is widely used in marketing, finance and even HR management.  However, I have not come across any confusion in curriculum so far between OM and OR. Though in many academic institutions, OR and Quantitative Methods are clubbed with Operations department, Operations faculty steer clear of OR and vice versa.

It is useful to have such discussions to clarify the issues, however.

in my view point the main course learning outcome of OM is students can be able to evaluate and apply several operation models to make the optimal decision. Thus, students should be understand those models beside to the terminologies in OM.

Operations Research in business is termed Quantitative Techniques in Decision Making. It is also a subject in Engineering, Sciences and Technology programs (where it is called Operations Research).  It is not the same as Operations Management which is a major program in Business Administration and where it is also a subject and where it is called Quantitative Techniques in Business or Decision Making.

As I am currently taking an operations management (OM) course as a PhD student, while in my "day job" being a full professor in the subject of applied math, specializing in mathematical optimization, I can say that OM need not concern itself with mathematics at all! Case studies, action research, and qualitative data analysis may have very little to do with math. And yet it is powerful and useful. 

OM and OR - two different field that complement each-other...but not delivered in the same module...

We should not deliver OM course as OR Curriculum as the approach of both OR and OM Courses are different. Operations Management broadly deals with the Managerial Issues with the applications of OR Techniques such as Transportation models, assignment problems, TSP,Location Analysis to mention few. But the delivery of these OR Models should have the rigor of Managerial Approach and that is how we can differentiate each other. As whole a OR and OM both are different in all aspects. 

Thank you

OM can indeed be quite far from quantitative OR. In fact, while I have taken courses in operations management I have learnt organisational techniques such as surveys, interviews, and case studies in a variety of forms, none of it being quantitative at heart. And yet the techniques are quite useful.