Automated Management System (AMS), the sum total of the methods and technical means that ensure highly efficient management of production on the basis of the extensive use of economic and mathematical methods for gathering, registering, transmitting, storing and processing the information required for decision-making. The introduction of AMSs was prompted by the increasingly important role management plays in modern production, the growing complexity of the problems facing the managerial bodies, and the need to process an enormous amount of information and promptly reach competent decisions. In this situation, an expansion of managerial bodies—an increase in the number of personnel and introduction of new links—cannot be regarded as an efficient way of solving the problem. Under the conditions of highly complex modern production and the scientific and technological revolution, another way has been evolved—automation of management on the basis of modern machinery, computers first and foremost, and other automatic devices for processing and transmitting information. Man controls this system in the most general way and works out determinative decisions. In the socialist countries, the purpose of AMSs is to raise the efficiency of social production. They are developed and introduced according to an integral economic plan taking account of all the possible ways for improving management of the economy. The Soviet Union envisages the creation of a nation-wide automated system for gathering and processing information for the purpose of stocktaking, planning and managing the economy, through a network of computer centres and a unified automated system of communications. This will make possible an integrated approach to planning and ensure a better balance between the components of the economic plan. AMSs fall into three main categories: 1) automated systems of management in factories; 2) automated systems of management for industries; 3) automated systems of management for functional administrative bodies, such as planning, statistical, financial, and banking organisations, organisations in charge of material and technical supply, etc. Depending on the purpose of AMSs and the way it combines human functions and those of the computing and managing machinery, all AMSs can be divided into two principal classes and varieties of them. The first includes systems of information that ensure the collection and issue of information concerning the production process, which people use to fulfil management functions in production. The second consists of management systems that do not only collect information, but issue orders to executives and executive mechanisms. The main indicators characterising the work of AMSs are: degree of economic efficiency; prompt operation; degree of reliability; the amount of information it is able to process; the degree to which management is automated.