My first guess when asked this many years ago was….”Probably when someone accidentally promoted a mathematician into management!”
Well, management science is a term that is synonymous with operations research. Operations research itself was coined during World War II by the british, when their military management called upon a group of scientists together to apply a scientific approach in the study of military operations to win the war. Back then, the main objective was to allocate scarce resources in an effective manner to various military operations and to the activities within each operation. The effectiveness of operations research in military spread interest in it to other government departments and industry.
Management science is basically operations research specific to management concerns. And the advent of computing has allow us to use computer-based mathematical modeling to answer the concerns. Calculations using card punch in the 1970s have evolved into spreadsheet systems and programming packages of today.
Except from Wikipedia on the term, ‘Management Science’:
Management science (MS), is the discipline of using a mathematical model, and other analytical methods, to help make better business management decisions. The field is also known as operations research (OR) in the United States or operational research in the United Kingdom, and these three terms are commonly interchanged and used to describe the same field.
Some of the fields that are englobed within Management Science include: logistics, supply chain management, production and inventory management, decision analysis, optimization, simulation, forecasting, game theory, network/transportation forecastingmathematical modeling, data mining, probability and statistics, resources allocation, project management, engineering as well as many others.
The management scientist’s mandate is to use rational, systematic, science-based techniques to inform and improve decisions of all kinds. Of course, the techniques of management science are not restricted to business applications but may be applied to military, medical, public administration, charitable groups, political groups or community groups. MS is also concerned with so-called ”soft-operational analysis”, which concerns methods for strategic planning, strategic decision support, and Problem Structuring Methods (PSM). At this level of abstraction, mathematical modeling and simulation will not suffice. Therefore, during the past 30 years, a number of non-quantified modelling methods have been developed. These include morphological analysis and various forms of influence diagrams.
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