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

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 was an extraordinary visionary who 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.