Gestion

Operations management and logistics lies at the heart of every organization, whether manufacturing or services, large or small, public or private, multinational or SMB. It is thus essential for all managers and business school graduates to master the fundamental concepts of operations management and logistics and to be capable of choosing and applying the best methods for the situation throughout their career. This textbook aims to present the essentials of operations management and logistics and to explain them in sufficient detail for the reader to apply them. The authors have deliberately stayed away from the latest trends in OML, not only because they will soon be outmoded anyway, but also because they are all rooted in the same timeless set of principles that can be applied to a variety of different contexts. A good manager should thus be like a chef who first masters the basics of his craft and can then combine them to make any recipe.

Finally, though much space is devoted to the quantitative tools essential to operational system design and logistics management, these tools are always subordinate to the management decisions they are meant to support. The central theme running through all the chapters is the need to make choices. In logistics and operations management, there is rarely a simple, clearly marked path. Every decision the manager makes involves give and take. In fact, a good subtitle for this book could have been “The Art of Compromise”.

Hélène Giroux is a full professor in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management at HEC Montréal. She holds an MBA from HEC Montréal and a PhD in Organizational Communication from Université de Montréal. She has authored many papers on the phenomenon of management fashions, quality management and education applied to operations management, in addition to co-producing a series of videos on managing operations and service businesses. In her 25 years of teaching, she has touched on all aspects of operations management and currently specializes in operations management in services. She received the HEC Montréal award for teaching excellence in 2009, and has been awarded a teaching fellowship by the Ministère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport du Québec since 2008.

Claire Poitras and Véronique Poirier are full-time lecturers in the Department of Logistics and Operations Management at HEC Montréal. In addition to their professional experience in the business community, both have several years of teaching experience in HEC Montréal’s Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) program.