In recent years, however, there has been a notable variety in the latter. Recent textbooks in POM are living proofs of the dilemma of developing the correct mix of quantitative models and qualitative concepts. A Taxonomical Model of POM Figure 1 represents the model. Quality Control, Power Curves, Sampling Sizes, Regression, and Forecasting. Other techniques vary in relative importance.
Practitioners indicate the use of a more diverse set of techniques than educators.
Following this mood POM textbooks in their recent versions are tucking the models from X and Y groups into appendices or supplements. Some books have even chosen to drop such models altogether. Any model or its extension that fails such a test should become a good candidate for removal. However, I also believe that it is high time that we debate the issue of the proper balance of content of a POM course, and try to converge, as a community, on a common subset of concepts and models. I leave that task to everyone interested in this field.