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This paper supports project based research and agrees with the view that it is impossible to draw a boundary around a group of subsystems in the real world so as to research only these. All aspects of the manufacturing system including strategy, management style and organisational structure are involved potentially. Project based research has produced little in the way of generalisable results, and in some cases is difficult to distinguish from management consultancy. What needs to be understood better are the methodologies of a general nature. The main movements are likely to be away from calculation towards data analysis and definition, and away from mathematical models towards formal descriptive models.

IT is a salutary experience for an editor to turn to some earlier issues for which he was responsible. A wry smile is likely to spring to life as he reads the brave words that now seem so confounded by experience. How, he asks himself, could he write with such pontifical assurance, forgetful of his native modesty?

Scheduling is defined by Baker as, “the allocation of resources over time to perform a collection of tasks”. The term facilities is often used instead of resources and the tasks to be performed may involve a variety of different operations.

In the operations management field, where data are always second best to reality, the whole success of a computing scheme will depend on the motivation of the users. A scheme is presented, based on the idea of simplifying the task of supplying relevant information to operations managers with the microcomputer, so that the flexibility and simplicity of manual systems can be preserved. The idea is based on three contentions; that the data structure itself must represent the business operations; that the operations on the computer system must initiate basic manual practices to gain user access and rapid implementation; that most (if not all) features usually present in larger computing schemes can be evolved through this data structuring approach, the end user remaining entirely in control of the system. The whole scheme hinges on the concept of a structured list as a lattice of data which forms an idealised model of operations for managing interdepartmental priorities. It is only when there is a model behind the data that the use of computers will be effective.

Editorial This special issue of Industrial Management & Data Systems is a huge departure from our usual journal/ monograph style. This is an additional issue to the year's volume — a bonus in fact.

The study of manufacturing strategy has now become established. But what about the shopfloor where it is supposed to be implemented? How well is this understood? This article follows through the strategy logic and then creates a complementary model for understanding the working of the shopfloor dynamics. The inter‐relationships between strategy and the shopfloor are then explained through these joint models and the outcome of four strategic changes examined through these. The implications for management are stated.

THERE were the depressing trade figures which were released last month to prove, if we did not already know, that things are not going too well for the country, and to strengthen the feeling that we are impotent in the face of an insoluble problem.

A conference can range from good to bad. It can be well or poorly organized, comfortably or indifferently housed, a profitable or wasted use of time. If conferences were rated like hotels and stars indicated their merit, the one held in Munich at the end of October should be awarded the maximum number.

MORE than a decade ago we were assured by the then head of Imperial Chemicals Industries that the man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive. We might venture to add as a footnote that such a man's journey will be easier, his destination more certain, if he first clears away the assorted debris that encumbers his route.

Describes the “high street trading exercise” and its value in revealing the theory of service management and the impact it has had on the student learning process. Also provides a means of researching particular perspectives on comparative service contexts.