History of Production Management and operation management function.

At the turn of the 20th century the economic structure in most of the develop countries of today was fast changing from a feudalistic economy. Feudalistic economy to that of an industrial and capitalistic economy. The nature of the industrial workers was changing and the methods of exercising control over the workers, to get the desired output are also to be changed. This change economy climate produce the new technicians concepts. 

Individual efficiency :

             Fredric W. Taylor studied the simple output to time relationship for manual labour such as brick laying. This form the precursor of the present day "time-study". Around the sametime, Frank glibreth and his wife Lillion glibreth examine the motions of the limbs of the workers in performing the jobs and try to standardise these motions into certain categories and equalise the classification to arrive at standards for time required to perform a given job. This was the precursor to the present day "motion -study". Although to these day Glibreth classification of moments is used extensively, there have been various modification and newer classification. 

Collective efficiency :

So far the focus was a controlling the work output of the manual labourer or the machine operator. The primary objective of production management was that of efficiency of the individual operator. The aspects of collective efficiency came into being later express through the efforts of scientist such as gantt. Who shifted the attention to scheduling of the operations. (Even now, we use gantt charts in operations scheduling).  The considerations of efficiency in the use of materials followed later. It was almost 1930,before a basic inventory model was presented by F. W. Harris. 

Quality :

After the progress of application of scientific principles so the manufacturing aspects, throught progress to control over the quality of the finished material itself. Till them, the focus was on the qualitative aspects, later on it shifted to the quality aspects. "Quality " which is an important customer service objective, come to be recognised for scientific analysis. The analysis of productive system, therefor, now also included the "effectiveness " criterion in addition to efficiency. In 1931, Walter shewart came up with his theory regarding control charts for quality or what is known as "process control ". This charts suggested a simple graphical methodology to monitor the quality characteristics of the output and how to control it. In 1935 

H. F. Dodge and H. G. Roming came up with application of statistical principles to the acceptance or rejection of the consignments supplied by the suppliers to exercise control over the quality. This spell which was develop over the years. It now known as " acceptance sampling. "

Effectiveness as a function of internal climate :

             In addition to effectiveness for the customer, the accept of effectiveness so function of internal climate drown on management scientist through the Hawthorne experiments which actually had the purpose of increasing the efficiency of the individual worker. These experiment show that worker efficiency went up when the intensity of illumination was gradually increased and even when it was gradually decreased the worker efficiency skill kept rising. This puzzle could be explain only through the angle of human psychology, the very fact that somebody cared mattered much to workers who gaves increased output. Till now, it was Taylor's theory of elementalisation of task which found much use in Henry Fords assembly line. 

Advent of operation research techniques :

      The path of operations research during the world war 2nd period saw a big boost in the application of scientific techniques in management. During this work, the allied force took the help of statistician, scientist, engineers etc. to analyse and answer questions such as what is the optimum way of mining the labourers of the area occupied by the Japanese?  What should be the optimum size of the supply ships, taking into account the cost of loss due to any attack and the cost of employee that defence fleet ? Such studies about the military operations was termed as QR. After world war ll this field was further investigated and developed by academic institution and various technique such as linear programming, mathematical programming, gane theory, queueing theory and the like developed by people like George. Dauntzig, A. Charness and WW. Cooper have became indispensable tools of management decision making.

The computer era :

After the break through made by another Marvel came into being the computer around 1955, IBM developed digital computer. This made possible the complex and repeated competitions involving various QR and other management science technique. In effects, it help to spread the use of management science concepts and technique in all fields of decision making. 

Services and relationships era:

The advances in computing technology, associated software, electronics and computer facilitated the manufacturing of a variety of goods and it's reach to the customer.  In parallel the demands for services such as transport, telecommunication and leisure activities also grew at a rapid space worldwide the service economy became as important as that of physical goods. In fact, manufacturing stared emulating same of the practices and principles of services. The far - eastern countries, particularly Japan seemed specialise in providing manufactured products with various services elements accompanying it. During the last quarter of a century, service has became an important factor in customer satisfaction. Like wise, many production management principles have been finding their way into services in order to improve the efficiency 's and effectiveness. 

                 The vary word "services " signifies same kind of "special burn" or "human touch". It is therefore natural the production management is now getting to be increasingly 'relationship ' oriented. There is a web of relationship between the company, it's customers and it's business associates. The production strategy, systems and procedures have begun to transfer according. 

Lessons from history :

          Economic history and manufacturing history are both important in the sense that this would suggest some lessons that can be learnt for the future. History helps us to known the trends and to take a peek at the future. If the 21st century organisation have to manage their operations well,  they will have to try to understand the "what and how" of the Productivity improvements in the past and what lend to the various other development in the field of production  . The  past would tell us a thing or two about the future if not everything, looking at the speed with which technology, economics, production and services systems and the societies values and framework seem to be changing are may tend to think the "unprecedented " have been happening at the drawn of this millennium.  However there seems to be a common thread running all through. 

                                 Limiting ourself to history of production or manufacturing, we see that the effort has always been an increasing Productivity through swift and even flow of materials through the production system. During the Taylor era the production activities centered on an individual. Hence, methods are to be found to stdise the work and to get the most out of the individual thus making the manufacturing at flows even and fast. Forbs assembly line was an attempt at further improving the speed and the evenness of the flows. Thereafter, quality improvements reduce the bottlenecks and the variability in the processes considerably. Thus, further facilitating the even and rapid flow of goods through 

the production system. 

                          The attempt has always been to reduce the 'variability ' because variability could impede the pace and the steadiness of the flow. Earlier, variability came mostly through the variability in the work of the workers. However in the later decades the variability came from the market customers started expecting a variety of products, manufacturers therefore, started grouping like products togethers, The flows of materials for those product were, therefore exposed more easily, this helped in quickly attending to bottlenecks if any and in ensuring a speedy and even flow through the manufacturing system cellulurar manufacturing or group technology was thus born materials requirements planning (MRP)  and enterprise resources planning (EPR)  were other efforts at reducing the variability by integrating various function within the operation system and the enterprise as a whole respectively.