HANDBOOK OF PRODUCTION AND INVENTORY CONTROL

• Other Authors: REINFELD, NYLES V. (Editor)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall 1987
• Subjects: Inventory control; Production control
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 In 1954, M. W. (Ron) Maddox and I gave a one-week public seminar on pro duction and inventory control, in Cleveland, Ohio. This may have been the first seminar of this type ever given on the subject. That program was repeated in the spring of 1955 at the Alcazar Hotel to a capacity crowd. From then on it ex panded rapidly. By 1958, it was taken to several major cities in the United States and Canada, and over the next few years, variations of the original were repeated hundreds of times. The programs ranged from one day to three weeks in length, depending on the subject matter and the level of management attend ing. Many others entered the field, and today, probably over a thousand pro grams are given each year in the United States alone, and the subject matter is devoted almost entirely to subdivisions of the whole field-so vast is the modern subject matter. Today, one person could hardly be expected to know the entire field of production and inventory control, and a completely thorough discussion could not be limited to one week, such as we did in our first pro grams. Today, there are at least thirty major areas of specialization in the field, not even mentioning the specialized technical know-how of computerization that swept over the field beginning in the early 1960s. Hence the seminars and conferences of today are specialized and limit themselves to discussions of cer tain techniques or areas of expertise, and the big conferences involving hun dreds of speakers limit themselves to certain important new developments in the field. Even the orientation and sources of creative ideas have shifted.