ABOUT THE JOURNAL
AIM & SCOPE
Decision Making in Manufacturing and Services (p-ISSN 1896-8325, e-ISSN 2300-7087) is an interdisciplinary, international, peer-reviewed, open access semiannual scientific journal dedicated to publishing research on how organizations make decisions: how production is planned, how supply chains are coordinated, how processes are designed and improved, and how services are delivered. These are management questions, and the journal’s primary discipline is accordingly management and quality studies.
The journal is distinctive in its approach to decision-making. Decisions are studied as problems that can be modeled, solved, and tested, so the work published here draws on operations research, optimization, game theory, statistics, and machine learning. Those methods serve the managerial question rather than standing in for it: a scheduling model is published because it tells a manufacturer how to sequence work, and a multi-criteria method because it helps an organization choose between options it actually faces. The published record supports this, and the evidence is set out under scientific disciplines below.
Papers should represent original contributions that significantly advance the theory or practice of decision-making in manufacturing and services. Papers examining strategic decision-making in manufacturing and services, as well as new and experimental topics, are especially welcome. Decision Making in Manufacturing and Services also publishes state-of-the-art reports by invited authors, critical reviews, and special issues devoted to particular topics.
The subject matter of the journal includes, but is not limited to, the following areas:
• planning and scheduling
• logistics and supply chain management
• design of manufacturing and service systems
• quality and process management, including statistical process control (SPC)
• sustainable management
• circular and zero-emission economy
• financial decision making in manufacturing and services
• operations research and optimization
• decision support tools and techniques
• computational intelligence
• artificial intelligence, including machine learning, deep learning and image recognition
• data science and visualization
• business intelligence
SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES
In the Polish classification of scientific disciplines, Decision Making in Manufacturing and Services is assigned primarily to management and quality studies (nauki o zarządzaniu i jakości), and additionally to information and communication technology (informatyka techniczna i telekomunikacja) and mechanical engineering (inżynieria mechaniczna).
The primary assignment follows from what the journal studies. Its subject is the decisions organizations make when producing goods and delivering services — what to make, in what order, with which resources, and at what level of inventory, quality, and cost. Those are managerial questions, whatever technique is used to answer them. The two additional disciplines describe the methods the journal relies on rather than its subject: decision problems here are modeled, solved, and tested, drawing on operations research, optimization, game theory, statistics and machine learning, and on the engineering of production and service systems.
The balance is visible in the published record. Across Volumes 1–19, 65% of articles address manufacturing and supply chain management, quality and process management, or applications in services, energy, public administration and finance; the remainder develop the decision-analytic methods on which that work rests. Since 2019, the share of applied and process-oriented research has grown further; 38% of articles draw on data or operating conditions from a specific organization, and a growing number are co-authored with practitioners.
Decision-making in manufacturing and services is not a single discipline in any national or international classification. The same journals appear in Scopus under Decision Sciences, Business, Management and Accounting, and Engineering, and in Web of Science under Operations Research and Management Science, Management, and the industrial and manufacturing engineering categories. The assignment above places the journal where its questions belong and names the methods it uses.
OPEN ACCESS
The journal is published in English only and provides immediate open access to its entire content under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright and grant the publisher a non-exclusive license to publish. No charges are made to authors at any stage — there are no submission, processing or publication fees — and readers need no subscription. Free availability supports the dissemination and impact of the research published here.
JOURNAL’S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL
Decision Making in Manufacturing and Services was founded in 2007 at the Faculty of Management of AGH University of Krakow by Professor Tadeusz Sawik, who edited it until 2021. It was established to give managerial decision problems in manufacturing and services a venue for rigorous study, using the methods such problems demand. Professor Grzegorz Ginda has been Editor-in-Chief since 2021. Volume 20, published in 2026, marks twenty years of continuous publication; over that period, the journal has published 121 research articles. It remains the only Polish management journal devoted specifically to decision-making in manufacturing and services, and it has kept that focus throughout its twenty volumes. Its authors come from 66 institutions in 24 countries, and its scientific board has included Stanley B. Gershwin, Kathryn E. Stecke, Alexandre Dolgui, Dmitry Ivanov, Erwin Pesch, Rainer Kolisch, Manoj K. Tiwari, Wiesław Kubiak and Henk Zijm.
The journal has organized two international conferences in Zakopane, in 2017 and 2019, and has published three guest-edited issues: in 2012, edited by Dirk Briskorn, Fred Glover, Florian Jaehn and Michael Pinedo; in 2015 on game theory and its applications, drawn from the SING10 conference held at the AGH University; and in 2024 on business process management, published alongside the 5th Polish BPM Symposium and the 22nd International Conference on Business Process Management held at the AGH University.
Between 2019 and 2020, the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education supported the journal under the first edition of its program „Wsparcie dla czasopism naukowych” for scientific journals.
