Bob Hayes: Forty years of leading operations management into uncharted waters

Bob Hayes: Forty years of leading operations management into uncharted waters

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Article ID: iaor20082060
Country: United States
Volume: 16
Issue: 2
Start Page Number: 159
End Page Number: 168
Publication Date: Jan 2007
Journal: Production and Operations Management
Authors:
Keywords: inventory
Abstract:

The enormous contributions of Bob Hayes to Operations Management (OM) are reviewed. His early work made innovative contributions to probability theory and utility estimation that enabled existing Operations Research theory to be applicable to real problems. Later, inspired by field trips to Japanese and German manufacturers, he joined Kim Clark to conduct an ambitious study of 12 plants in three companies, establishing the impact on productivity of factors such as reject rate, work-in-process, and production rate variation. In the 1980s, when adoption of advanced manufacturing automation was in vogue, Bob joined Jai Jaikumar to offer a caution, that new manufacturing technologies required new ways of managing and that advanced technology coupled with obsolete management would produce poorer, not better, results. Perhaps Bob's greatest contribution was to raise OM to a more strategic level. With numerous coauthors, notably Steve Wheelwright, he provided a framework for corporate and manufacturing strategy and showed how to achieve alignment between the two, particularly in the choice of production processes. Recent papers articulated a vision for OM in which a focus on the issues of operating managers provides a consistent framework, but enables our research agenda to evolve as the world's economy changes.

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