"Arriving Today" a book by Christopher Tims
A couple of weeks ago, I spotted the book "Arriving Today" by Christopher Tims in our local library, and the blurb on the cover suggested that I might find it interesting to an O.R. reader. Essentially, the book is about the journey of a small item from manufacturer to customer in the 2020s, where so much commerce is done online. And in manufacturing, storage and transport, O.R. plays a part. Having finished the book, O.R. does get a mention, but not enough to merit a place in the extensive index. As the UK O.R. Society repeatedly stresses, O.R. is "The Hidden Science". The mention in the book comes alongside queueing theory, and attributes to the O.R. world the concept of a "buffer stock". That said, buffer stocks are scarcely mentioned except at one stage in the supply chain. So was it worth reading? The first half of the book deals with the shipping of that small item from a factory in Vietnam, to a container port in that country, across the Pa
