To help managers to decide alternative courses of actions by identifying and taking advantages of opportunities and by solving the identified service delivery problems.To provide information to programme managers that they can use to make decisions for improving their programme operations.Whenever social medicine passes from the stage of observation & classification to that of discovering & recommending appropriate action, it is involved in OR.Any formalized quantitative analysis whose purpose is to improve the efficiency in a situation where ‘efficiency’ is clearly defined.OR does not press upon the need of new techniques and new inventions, their demand is for systems composed of currently available techniques which give the optimal utilization of scarce economic resources.OR is defined as “ Application of quantitative methods to the solution of management problems which includes a systems approach in which a large number rather than a few factors are considered by a groups of scientists from different fields”.Today it has found application in most of the disciplines such as management, public administration, health, engineering etc.Attracted the attention of industrial managers who also were seeking solution to their complex executive problems.The success of OR in the 2nd world war demonstrated that many apparently complex problems could be usefully analyzed using simple models to approximate the critical variables and relationships.The term “Operational Research” was first coined during the 2nd World War.