March 19, 2024

When I began studying Operations Management (OM) in my Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech in the 1990’s, the discipline was much different. It was often called “Production and Operations Management” which indicated its emphasis on the production or manufacture of goods. While service sector jobs were already outpacing the manufacturing or goods-producing sector jobs by the late 1960’s, the service economy has boomed since while the goods-producing economy has remained fairly stable. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1990’s that the study of OM began putting significant emphasis on how to