Answer:
Operations Research addresses a wide variety of issues in transportation, inventory planning, production planning, communication operations, computer operations, financial assets, risk management, revenue management, and many other fields where improving business productivity is paramount.
As OR has made (over the years) significant contributions in virtually all industries, in almost all managerial and decision-making functions, and at most organizational levels, the list of OR applications is prodigious. Successful OR applications can be found in a broad array of industries dealing with challenges such as planning, routing, scheduling, forecasting, process analysis and decision analysis.
OR assists decision-makers in almost any management function. To illustrate, OR supports the key decision making process, allows to solve urgent problems, can be utilized to design improved multi-step operations (processes), setup policies, supports the planning and forecasting steps, and measures actual results.
- Manufacturing : OR’s success in contemporary business pervades manufacturing and service operations, logistics, distribution, transportation, and telecommunication.
Operations research is used to for various activities which include scheduling, routing, workflow improvements, elimination of bottlenecks, inventory control, business process re-engineering, site selection, or facility and general operational planning.
OR helps in developing software for material flow analysis and design for flexible manufacturing facilities, using pattern recognition and graph theory algorithms. Further, approaches for the design of re-configurable manufacturing systems and progressive automation of discrete manufacturing systems are under development. Additional OR projects focus on the industrial deployment of computer-based methods for assembly line balancing, business process reengineering, capacity planning, pull scheduling, and setup reduction.
- Revenue Management: The application of OR in revenue management entails
- first to accurately forecasting the demand, and
- secondly to adjust the price structure over time to more profitably allocate fixed capacity.
3. Supply Chain Management: In the area of Supply Chain Management, OR helps in taking decisions that include the who, what, when, and where abstractions from purchasing and transporting raw materials and parts, through manufacturing actual products and goods, and finally distributing and delivering the items to the customers.
The primary objective here is to reduce overall cost while processing customer orders more efficiently than before. The power of utilizing OR methods allows examining a rather complex and convoluted chain in a comprehensive manner, and to search among a vast number of combinations for the resource optimization and allocation strategy that seem most effective, and hence beneficial to the operation.
- Retailing: In supermarkets, data from store loyalty card schemes is analyzed by OR groups to advice on merchandising policies and profitability improvement.
OR methods are also used to decide when and where new store developments should be made.
- Financial Services: In financial markets, OR practitioners address issues such as portfolio and risk management and planning and analysis of customer service. They are widely employed in Credit Risk Management—a vital area for lenders needing to ensure that they find the optimum balance of risk and revenue.
OR techniques are also applied in cash flow analysis and capital budgeting.
- Marketing Management: OR helps marketing manager in making the apt selection of product mix. It helps them in making optimum sales resource allocation and assignments.
- Human Resource Management: OR techniques are being applied widely in the functional area of Human Resource Management by helping the human resource managers in activities like manpower planning, resource allocation, staffing and scheduling of training programs.
- General Management: OR helps in designing Decision Support System and management of information systems, organizational design and control, software process management and Knowledge Management.
- Production systems: The area of operations research that concentrates on real-world operational problems is known as production systems. Production systems problems may arise in settings that include, but are not limited to, manufacturing, telecommunications, health-care delivery, facility location and layout, and staffing.
The area of production systems presents special challenges for operations researchers. Production problems are operations research problems, hence solving them requires a solid foundation in operations research fundamentals. Additionally, the solution of production systems problems frequently draws on expertise in more than one of the primary areas of operations research, implying that the successful production researcher cannot be one-dimensional.
Production systems problems cannot be solved without an in-depth understanding of the real problem, since invoking assumptions that simplify the mathematical structure of the problem may lead to an elegant solution for the wrong problem. Common sense and practical insight are common attributes of successful production planners.
At the current time, the field of OR is extremely dynamic and ever evolving. To name a few of the contemporary (primary) research projects, current work in, primarily through the integration of the philosophies of the Theory of Constraints and Lean Manufacturing.
