Operational Research in practice: Experiences of an Operational Research OR group in industry

Much has been written about the ‘failure of OR’, its causes and possible remedies. Literature on the successful application of Operational Research OR is less abundant. This paper reviews the experiences of an Operational Research OR group in a large industrial organization, from 1981 to the middle of 1988, by analysing 188 projects. The adoption of a project approach proved to be very fruitful. Clearly, Operational Research OR can contribute to the solution of practical decision-making problems, provided it refrains from isolating a given problem from its original context and pursuing its optimal solution. Instead, Operational Research OR will encounter many satisfied clients if it merely ‘seeks to produce an understanding of managerial problems and to develop models which will enable the consequences of decisions to be investigated’.