Abstract
This article draws some methodological and organisational lessons from our experiences in developing and implementing a supply chain model for a multinational company in Brazil. The lessons are from the soft side of OR modelling and centre on factors to which we should have paid more attention: the involvement of all potential users of a model, exploration of how users make decisions in practice and with what data, appreciation of the organisational constraints and culture of the decision-making environment, the pro-active and exhaustive validation a model with operational users rather than over-reliance on a client executive's strategic view of the model's purpose.
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*Alistair Clark is a Senior Lecturer in Management Science in the School of Business and Management at the University of Teesside. He was formerly a Production Systems Specialist at UniSoma SA. an Operational Research (OR) consulting and systems development company in Brazil. He has also been an academic adviser at IBM's Latin American Institute of Technology, and a lecturer at Kingston Polytechnic, London. His research interests include OR applied to production and operations management.
**Danilo da Silva Campos is 25 years old and graduated in Applied and Computational Mathematics from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently completing his master's degree in Systems Engineering at the same university. For the last three years, he has been an active OR consultant and now has his own company OpSearch Consultoria, specializing in logistics and production planning.
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Clark, A., da Silva Campos, D. Do the Right Thing. OR Insight 11, 24–27 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1057/ori.1998.12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ori.1998.12