The Marriage of OM and Information Technology
Today as we noted earlier information technology (IT) plays a critical role in the design and management of production processes Business process reengineering supply chain management and sophisticated tools for systems integration such as SAP all defined later in the book require integrated solutions that marry OM and IT. To illustrate a survey of consulting practice areas showed that 31 percent of the services offered by the 40 largest consulting firms were in the process operations management area which implies the blending of OM and IT. 10 Thus while information technology has always been a key factor in the management of factory operations its application throughout the firm to other functional areas such as marketing and finance suggests a major evolutionary step in the development of the field.
