Operational research can do more for managers than they think!

When it is necessary for managers to make decisions, Operational Research OR can do more for them than many of them think. Operational Research OR has developed powerful tools for comparing alternative scenarios quantitatively, for making the effects of decisions visible and hence open to discussion, and for reducing uncertainty in complex situations. The Operational Research OR worker does not take decisions out of the manager’s hands; but he does help him to improve the quality of his decisions and to shorten the time to reach them. This is achieved by revealing the consequences of possible decisions in as quantitative a way as possible. The intuition, experience and common-sense of the manager remain indispensable for the final two steps: the selection of a chosen solution and its implementation. Nevertheless, there is something strange about that intuition: sometimes ‘reasonable’ (heuristic) solutions appear not to be the ‘best’. Common-sense and a heuristic approach often fail because they are arbitrary in the selection of a starting-point in the sequence in which choices are made, in the selection of criteria to be considered when characterizing a process, and in the amount of effort undertaken in order to prove that the eventual ‘solution’ really is the best one (or almost so). Neat examples of this phenomenon can be found in Geoffrion and Roy. They suffer from sub-optimization, because the mutual influences of step-by-step decisions are not taken into consideration.