Preface
The impetus for writing this book is the result of a number of conversations with friends and associates, an accumulation of professional experiences, and, most recently, my interactions with business students and faculty regarding operations and process management improvements.
The increased focus on supply chain principles and their business considerations in a global economy has often resulted in less time in many business school curriculums for more in-depth coverage of specific operations methods such as process analysis, service processes, yield management, forecasting, and the effective application of information (the subject of this book). There also is little time for class discussions regarding the factors affecting the variability of the predicted results of such methods. As a result, these topics are often omitted or only provided as chapter supplements in recent editions of operations management textbooks.
To help address this situation in the College of Business at Oregon State University, I suggested to several of my colleagues that we should add a process management course to precede or accompany the existing operations management course. Prof. René Reitsma, who taught an introductory IT course for sophomores, approached me with the idea of integrating that course with process management topics to form a new core course as a prerequisite to the current operations management course. After some discussion, we also agreed to use service processes for class examples and exercises as the operations course already covered manufacturing examples, René championed the proposal in cooperation with another colleague, V. T. Raja, and got approval for the new course to be required at the sophomore level for all OSU business students.
This book combines some of the core content we presented in the course with some considerations and applications of more interest to practicing small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) managers and professionals. An earlier Business Expert Press book, Waiting Line Applications,1 presents an in-depth discussion of the queuing process content that was included in the course.