Edelman Award
Edelman: The Final Six
Led by Kathy Chou, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at Hewlett-Packard, the 2009 Edelman Award-winning team included Ann Brecht, Brian Cargille, Russ Chadinha, Gavin DeNyse, Shailendra Jain, Holger Mishal, Thomas Olavson, Cookie Padovani, Kurt Sunderbruch, Robert Tarjan, Julie Ward, Joseph Woods, Bin Zhang of HP; Jason Amaral of Emeraldwise LLC; Dirk Beyer of M-Factor; Chris Fry of Strategic Management Solutions; Qi Feng of the University of Texas at Austin; Sesh Raj of DSApps, Inc.; Krishna Venkatraman of Intuit; and Jing Zhou of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Their presentation was entitled, "HP Transforms Product Portfolio Management with Operations Research."
Other finalists included:
CSX Transportation
for "CSX Railway Cashes in on
Optimized Equipment Distribution."
CSX used math modeling to create a system for assigning and repositioning empty cars. The company claims approximately $2 billion total savings from car mileage reductions, car management workforce reduction and capital avoidance, and notes other qualitative benefits of the system to the public.
IBM
for "Operations Research Improves
Sales Productivity at IBM."
IBM used operations research to help the company identify new sales opportunities and to better allocate sales resources to the best future revenue-generating accounts.
Marriott International
for the "Group Pricing Optimizer."
The company's operations research-aided system empowers the sales team with the information they need to profitably negotiate the price of proposed group bookings. The system automates a complex manual process to maximize revenue, hotel profitability and the quality of time spent taking care of customers. Since its implementation GPO has been used to contract over $1 billion in group business.
Norske Skog
for "Norske Skog Improves Global Profitability using O.R."
The publication paper industry has faced declining markets and margins for several years. The Norwegian-based company, with plants in 12 countries on four continents, used operations research to downsize and reduce manufacturing and supply chain costs, potentially $120 million per annum (~3% of turnover). Thanks to robust analysis, tough decisions were made and implemented with minimal disruption.
Zara
for "Zara Uses Operations Research to Reengineer Its Global Distribution Process."
The Spanish clothing manufacturer and retailer, which achieves Fast Fashion by making millions of shipments a week to stores from its central warehouses, used operations research to optimize its distribution process and increase in-season sales by an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent — in excess of $230 million in 2007 and $350 million in 2008.
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