Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon's work and its role in the renaissance and evolution of operations management

Early work in aggregate production planning has evolved into a major business process known as sales and operations planning. In the 1950s, a team led by Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon, which also included Bonini and Winters, worked on aggregate production planning and forecasting and published a series of papers and a book. The literature contains reports of at least 73 applications of their work in four companies and three application studies. Holt et al.'s work and its visibility led to a renaissance of the field of operations and supply chain management as we know it today and brought two paradigm changes in the domain and the role of operations and supply chain management. First, seemingly unrelated and non-managerial individual functions started to emerge as parts of an integrated system of managing production. Second, aggregate production planning brought to forefront the central role of operations management by linking it with supply chains and other functions in the organization.