Schaum's Outline of Operations Management

Professor Monks has done an excellent job of summarizing and giving worked out problems for a very useful field of industry that is often neglected in pure and applied mathematics. This neglect, especially at the pre-college level but also at higher levels, makes it harder for management and operations research college instructors to convey the quantitative methods to their students. These methods are fascinating and include statistical forecasting (with time series and exponential smoothing, correlation, regression), statistical quality control, production scheduling and control (linear programming, dynamic programming), manufacturing /service and maintenance (queuing theory, reliability, simulation, calculus), budgeting, inventory, etc. I recommend this book for everybody in business for themselves or for others and for students at all levels in order to tie in their studies more practically with the real economic world. In addition, the more people are familiar with the methods, the less employment mistakes will be made since so many of the methods interact with hiring, firing, temporary layoffs, etc. With more talent in the field, alternative methods can be developed and tried (for example, present theory assumes that a lot of things involve independent or non-influencing events, but a lot of events are very interdependent and the theory needs far more development there - see my review of Castillo).