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Comment by jhallenworld | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that there is no mention of Operations Research in this article.

I'm actually curious if any business use Operations Research for real, vs. managers just guessing. I mean do something like Linear Programming to optimize profits based on various constraints.

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There is the Franz Edelman award from INFORMS [1] that used to publish accessible articles about how OR techniques are being used in industry.

The MIT LGO program has some theses published online that show how OR techniques are applied at smaller scale in industry.

I’ve been involved in some smaller scale projects that used mathematical programming techniques to help with scheduling manufacturing lines and call center shifts. We’ve used simulation to help understand how improvements can be made in call centers and warehouses.

Lots of this stuff is under industrial engineering at the operational level.

At the supply chain level, often a company is using the services of someone else. Sometimes they’ll have industrial engineers working with these techniques.

[1] https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/INFORMS-Prize...

I've been rather nerdy on Operations Research. It seems that today it's a mostly unknown field limited to few companies. Maybe it turned out to be too difficult for ordinary managers, who just wanted dashboards, maybe people weren't really ready for it, maybe it got crushed by the agile industrial context ... but if you look at writings from the 70s and 80s it seems that there is an agreement that for an OR department to be truly successful it would require a mandate to truly transform the business and disrupt common power structures - which is why instead they often get relegated to just doing dashboards. Over time they became data analysts and then the data scientists of today.

I personally think that there is a LOT of very useful stuff in the field.

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