A Classroom Approach to Stock Control

Extract

Ever since the war, the methods, techniques and results of operational research have increasingly been affecting the organisation and functioning of modern industry and commerce. Diverse in character and embracing general and unsophisticated approaches as well as specialised mathematical ones, operational research is initially concerned with the analysis of situations and the identification of the factors affecting them. Once such analysis has taken place, certain standard optimisation procedures are used, or new ones devised, so as to assign a set of values to the parameters involved that will yield maximum efficiency, minimum cost, greatest speed, etc. One of the simpler and better known examples of the effects of such operational analysis was the institution of the penny post in 1840. Two factors were considered to affect the cost of a postal system: the collection and distribution of mail on the one hand and its actual transportation on the other. The fact that the cost of the latter was only a fraction of the former enabled penny postage to be established. This process of isolating relevant factors and making them interact in certain ways to yield a model of a real situation is one which today’s teachers of mathematics cannot afford to ignore. It is contended here that, if this approach is properly introduced into the classroom and applied to simplified industrial or local problems, it can help