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The need for simple educational case-studies to show the benefit of soft operations research to real-world problems

The need for simple educational case-studies to show the benefit of soft operations research to... Soft operations research (OR) methods have the potential to provide deep qualitative insights into the complex problems that face our world. However, the propagation of soft OR has, at best, stagnated in recent years and it has been rejected from mainstream academic hard (quantitative) OR. In this paper, it is proposed that there is a need for simple educational example that actually shows the benefit of soft OR. The paper suggests that these examples should be real-world case studies that do not include convoluted graphics or verbose prose descriptions. An example case study has been included in this paper. This case study investigates the impact of beer price changes to two virtually identical restaurant-bars in the Hampton Roads region of the USA. The case study shows that a simple quantitative analysis results in erroneous conclusions which could be avoided by conducting a simple qualitative analysis. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of System of Systems Engineering Inderscience Publishers

The need for simple educational case-studies to show the benefit of soft operations research to real-world problems

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Publisher
Inderscience Publishers
Copyright
Copyright © Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
ISSN
1748-0671
eISSN
1748-068X
DOI
10.1504/IJSSE.2019.097927
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Soft operations research (OR) methods have the potential to provide deep qualitative insights into the complex problems that face our world. However, the propagation of soft OR has, at best, stagnated in recent years and it has been rejected from mainstream academic hard (quantitative) OR. In this paper, it is proposed that there is a need for simple educational example that actually shows the benefit of soft OR. The paper suggests that these examples should be real-world case studies that do not include convoluted graphics or verbose prose descriptions. An example case study has been included in this paper. This case study investigates the impact of beer price changes to two virtually identical restaurant-bars in the Hampton Roads region of the USA. The case study shows that a simple quantitative analysis results in erroneous conclusions which could be avoided by conducting a simple qualitative analysis.

Journal

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering – Inderscience Publishers

Published: Jan 1, 2019

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