Practical Managerial Decision Making Tools: Operations Research

The purpose of this paper is to advocate the managerial practice of making decisions based not only on intuition, but intuition coupled with quantitative analysis. Operations Research (OR) or Optimization is one of the leading managerial decision science tools used by profit and nonprofit organizations such as Ford Motors, AT&T, Merrill Lynch, Samsung, US Army Recruitment and Olympic games organizing committees. Such technique is utilized by functional groups such as Industrial Engineering in effort to support Operations Managers to make economically feasible decisions on a range of systematic challenges. In order to make the effective yet efficient decisions, managers must have fundamental understanding of the decision science tools utilized in developing set of recommendations to choose from. With this motivation, this paper includes brief discussion on background of OR, its methodology and publicly reported benefits of implementing OR and challenges in OR. Since the purpose of this literature is to disseminate information to advocate the importance of scientific approaches in the process of managerial decision-making, research and academic disclosures are intentionally omitted.