Neglect and Decline of Manufacturing Management Subject Resulted in Decline of Manufacturing Sector in USA

 

BBA, MBA education had more focus on marketing and finance areas. There was education in scientific management also. But in Harvard, there was systematic campaign to malign scientific management and F.W. Taylor's contribution. In the departments focusing on manufacturing and production management, a trend emerged whereby manufacturing and production were substituted by operations management of service businesses. Slowly the textbooks became production and operations management and then Operations Management. The attention to manufacturing still declined further. There is a body, AIIE which became the main body supporting industrial engineering. This body supported Engineering Management also. Even this body neglected engineering and diverted attention to non-engineering areas like hospitals etc.  The net result is decline in research and innovation in manufacturing management in USA.

Some Japanese persons were present when F.W. Taylor made his presentation on Scientific Management. They instantly recognized its utility and they developed it further in Japan in their own way taking the help of US persons like Gilbreth. While the Japanese manufacturing prospered, US manufacturing declined due to their neglect and motivated criticism of Taylor and his contribution to productivity improvement in manufacturing.

The domain of production and operations management and the role of Elwood Buffa in its delineation

Kalyan Singhal, Jaya Singhal, Martin K. Starr

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2006.06.004   

Abstract

Production and operations management (POM), as we know it today, was established in the 1960s in response to various drivers. Elwood Spencer Buffa first published his textbook, Modern Production Management, in 1961. He had degrees in business and engineering and had worked as an industrial engineer. He was also part of the UCLA–RAND academic complex whose operations researchers coined the term management science and conceived the idea of The Institute of Management Sciences. Buffa coined the term operations management and consolidated knowledge from various streams of production management, including operations research and industrial engineering, into a coherent managerial framework.

Modern business education had started to emerge around 1959 after reports from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation recommended improving research and analytical approaches. Many business schools created courses in POM. At the time, no single book covered what we now call production and operations management. The POM faculty at most business schools, including Columbia's Graduate School of Business, adopted Buffa's book enthusiastically when they introduced courses in “production management”. Buffa  covered supply chain management, design for manufacturing, quality management, service operations, and computer applications and the automated factory. The POM community pursued these issues more actively 2 or 3 decades later.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/j.jom.2006.06.004

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1937-5956.2006.tb00238.x

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Developing the article: Manufacturing Process Design.

Please share useful articles or papers. Give reference. I want to use and include in the bibliography.

https://nraomtr.blogspot.com/2024/09/manufacturing-process-design-work-flow.html

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