It’s not uncommon for industrial operations and engineering textbooks to weigh in a 1,000 pages or more. But University of Michigan professor Mark Daskin’s new book takes a different approach. Titled “Bite-Sized Operations Management,” its slim 200 pages provide a more concise, focused treatment of the fundamental topics of operations management. Daskin is the Clyde W Johnson Collegiate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering.
The book introduces principles and key models of operations management. Three themes are woven throughout:
- Optimization or trying to do the best you can with the resources you have
- Managing tradeoffs between conflicting objectives
- Dealing with uncertainty
“This book grew out of IOE 202 (Operations Engineering and Analytics, formerly Operations Management). I love teaching that course and I truly enjoyed writing this book,” Daskin said.
”Bite-Sized Operations Management” includes chapters on key topics in probability, chapters on inventory management which integrate optimization and uncertainty, and chapters on linear programming, a number of short chapters on location modeling including a chapter on the tradeoff between key location objectives. The book also covers queueing theory and modeling and decision theory.
The text will be accompanied by an extensive collection of online supplemental material that many readers and instructors will find useful.
