Differences in knowledge processing: Why operations researchers do not understand manufacturing managers

Manufacturing Management and Operations Research should be complementary disciplines. This work examines the importance of learning and knowledge capture to both groups as they seek to understand the manufacturing environment. The work discussed in this research is empirical, systematic, and compares a group of OR professionals to a group of manufacturing managers. A particular technology was selected to provide a focus for the detailed analysis: and this technology was discrete event simulation, and the managers involved ·in the research, were based in Australian companies. This paper develops an empirically based analysis of one aspect of manufacturing management of interest to both groups. From the data it is clear that manufacturing managers and operations researchers have different approaches to the collection, storage and codification of knowledge, and the infonnation subjected to this process is different. These findings indicate that these two groups have significant difficulty in communicating concepts such as knowledge management because oftheir clearly divergent mindsets.