Free for All—Corporate Models: The State of the Art

By the early 1960's operations research models had reached the stage of development where they were being applied to some of the basic operations of a company such as inventory management, scheduling and resource allocation. During the past several years model development made such impressive strides that it was feasible to think in terms of modeling the corporation as a whole and interest began to focus on corporate modeling. By early 1969, many companies were developing corporate models or at the very least indicated their intention to do so. An undetermined number of models were completed. Another undetermined number were under construction or on the drawing boards. The exact situation was not clear and the author decided that the best way to separate fact from rumor and to learn what was actually being done was to ask the companies and he accordingly designed a questionnaire.