Strengthening the Empirical Base of Operations Management

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Fisher: Strengthening the Empirical Base of Operations Management Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 9(4), pp. 368–382, © 2007 INFORMS 381 by journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and Production and Operations Management is important. This special issue of M&SOM on empirical methods in operations management, which is guest edited by Aleda Roth, is clearly a positive step in this direction. Gupta et al. (2006) also report encouraging evidence that publication of empirical research is increasing. I hope the journals will take the same broad view of empirical research offered in this article and consider publishing interesting cases. Increased publication of broader empirical research will both require and encourage forging standards of what is good empirical research. Professional societies could also sponsor industryacademic conferences to provide a context for academics to interact with practicing managers to learn the issues they face and identify meaningful research topics. An example is the conference “Improving Supply Chain Synchronization and Strategy through Industry-Academia Collaboration” organized by the POMS Supply Chain College and held at the University of Chicago on May 3, 2005. Finally, those who have conducted empirical research know that access to data is a challenge. Finance research into capital markets starting in the 1960s was greatly facilitated by the CenterforResearch in Security Prices at the University of Chicago; it provided a rich data set on security prices and related variables. It would be wonderful if a professional society would considerwhat data would be useful for researchers in operations management and then take on the task of maintaining those databases. Alternatively, one of the societies might act as a clearing house to enable individual researchers to make their data publicly available to others. Happily, data sharing is starting to happen. Willems (2007) provides a data set that describes 38 real-world multiechelon supply chains that is publicly available through Manufacturing & Service Operations Management at the journal’s website (http://msom.pubs.informs.org). I sincerely believe that the pursuit of these activities will have a tremendously vitalizing impact on our profession, and I hope these remarks will stimulate comments by others on this issue. Acknowledgments The author is grateful to Garrett van Ryzin for suggesting this paperand forproviding encouragement and advice on drafts. The author also appreciates the helpful comments of Gérard Cachon, Nicole DeHoratius, Jan Fransoo, Vishal Gaur, Steve Graves, Michael Lapre, Hau Lee, John Paul Mac- Duffie, Kamalini Ramdas, Zeynep Ton, Karl Ulrich, Chris Voss, Luk van Wassenhove, and two anonymous reviewers. This paperis based on three talks the authorhas given on this subject: a talk in the MSOM Fellows Award session of the 2002 INFORMS San Jose Meeting and plenary talks at the 2005 POMS Chicago Meeting and the 2006 INFORMS Hong Kong Meeting. References Bartholdi, J., L. Platzman, R. Collins, W. Warden. 1983. A minimal technology routing system for meals on wheels. Interfaces 13 1–8. Bertrand, J. W. M., J. C. Fransoo. 2002. Operations management research methodologies using quantitative modeling. Internat. J. Oper. Production Management 22(2) 241–264. Bertrand, J. W. M., J. C. Fransoo. 2006. Modeling and simulation. C. Karlsson, ed. Researching Operations Management. Forthcoming. Bowman, E. 1963. 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