Towards a systems approach to operations management

Since their appearance on earth, humans have always had to deal with different problems. Progress and development have been the results of their success in overcoming these problems. But every problem solved has led to others, that are usually more complex than the previous ones. Increasing degrees of complexity made it necessary to develop new ways of interpreting our world and tackling our problems. One of the words that can characterise the world that we are living in today, the best, is change. Like everything else, the nature of our problems is also changing with an unprecedented speed. We need new and effective approaches and methodologies to deal with them. We cannot use any more the ones that we have inherited from previous generations.