Some observations on practising successful operational research

Much has been written about the decline of Operational Research. In the 1960s it had already been proclaimed dead and the decreasing number of OR departments in industrial enterprises seems to support this thesis. The question seems to be: ‘Why is OR apparently disappearing at a time when the major obstacles to OR applications in the past, namely lack of computer-readable data, lack of software and hardware have been overcome?’ I report on 30 years of successful external OR activities and offer some observations which I have made while being active at a university and in OR companies in Germany.