INFORMS salutes analytics achievement

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the premier organization for advanced analytics professionals, presented a series of awards for business analytics achievement at the 2012 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research held in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Topping the list of presentations at the Oscar-like dinner gala was the Franz Edelman Award for outstanding, real-world applications, innovation and widespread use of operations research and analytics. Awarded for more than 40 years, the Edelman competition is considered the  “Super Bowl of Operations Research.”

And the winners were …

Franz Edelman Award: TNT Express, headquartered in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, won the 2012 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. TNT Express used operations research to modernize its operations, resulting in more than 200 million euros in savings while simultaneously reducing the company’s carbon footprint.

“Little did we know when the financial crisis hit us hard in 2008 that we’d be standing here tonight at the Edelman Award ceremony,” said Chris Goossens, managing director of Global Networks and Operations at TNT Express.

Every week, TNT Express transports 4.7 million parcels, documents and pieces of freight to more than 200 countries while maintaining the company’s service standards. Until recently, this was done without mathematical support. In 2005, TNT moved to a fact-based decision-making system, the Global Optimization (GO) Program, which uses mathematical modeling.

As a result, decision-making improved system-wide, with significant operational benefits. Between 2008 and 2011, TNT Express realized more than 207 million euros in savings and benefits.

The six finalists competing in the 2012 Franz Edelman Award competition included teams from Carlson Hotels, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Greek shipping company Danaos Corporation, HP and Intel.

Every year, the Franz Edelman competition recognizes outstanding examples of operations research-based projects that have transformed companies, entire industries and people’s lives. O.R. uses advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions. Since its inception in 1972, cumulative dollar benefits from Edelman finalist projects have totaled $180 billion.

Carlson Hotels, the Centers for Disease Control, Greece-based container ship owner Danaos Corporation, Hewlett-Packard and Intel were the other finalists for the Edelman.

INFORMS Prize: The INFORMS Prize for outstanding and widespread use and influence of operations research throughout an organization was awarded to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. One of the oldest and largest cancer hospitals in the world, Sloan-Kettering treats more than 25,000 patients a year. Sloan-Kettering won the 2007 Edelman for the work of Dr. Marco Zaider in collaboration with Eva Lee of the Georgia Tech Institute of Technology for using optimization modeling to create more effective prostate cancer treatment. (Lee was the technical leader of the CDC team that was a finalist in this year’s Edelman competition.)

Unlike the Edelman Award, which honors a specific project, the INFORMS Prize recognizes organizations for ongoing and pervasive O.R. activity. For example, O.R. has improved the utilization of expensive radiation oncology equipment at Sloan-Kettering, thus avoiding capital expenditure, construction and operations costs of more than $20 million. The hospital O.R. methods in determining improved strategies for building a new leukemia center, resulting in a $43 million improvement in donations along with an 11 percent increase in treated patients per year. O.R. has also been integral in improving Sloan-Kettering’s patient forecasting and staffing decisions,

Innovation in Analytics Award: Booz Allen Hamilton won the first Innovation in Analytics Award presented by the Analytics Section of INFORMS for the project, “Enhancing Immigration Enforcement with Decision Analytics.” The consulting company innovatively applied traditional operations research techniques to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efficiently align its resources to remove criminal offenders. Booz Allen’s implementation of analytics spanned three years and involved developing a set of models used to solve challenging problems such as forecasting the number of criminal illegal aliens, optimizing a technology deployment schedule and minimizing the transportation costs of removal. The impact of the work resulted in a doubling of criminal alien removals leading to greater public safety for the American people.

The Innovation in Analytics Award recognizes “creative and unique developments, applications or combinations of analytical techniques.” The prize promotes the awareness of the value of analytics techniques in unusual applications or in creative combination to provide unique insights and/or business value.

According to Analytics Section President Michael Gorman, who presented the award, the competition drew 50 submissions. Booz Allen was named the winner following multiple rounds of vetting and review by a panel of judges.

INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize: The Tauber Institute for Global Operations at the University of Michigan is the first winner of the UPS George D. Smith Prize. The UPS George D. Smith Prize is a new INFORMS award created in the spirit of strengthening ties between industry and the schools of higher education that graduate young practitioners of operations research. It is awarded to an academic department or program for effective and innovative preparation of students to be good practitioners of operations research, management science, or analytics.

The Tauber Institute for Global Operations provides interdisciplinary education, successfully uniting the fields of engineering and business. The Institute strives to meet corporations’ needs for a new kind of graduate – leaders with exceptional academic background and relevant professional experience who can successfully integrate business and engineering perspectives to lead international corporations into the future.

Daniel H. Wagner Prize: Intel Corporation’s Decision Engineering group was saluted for winning the 2011 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. The winner was first announced last fall but Intel was formally honored in conjunction with the 2012 Edelman Gala. Karl Kempf, a member of the Intel finalist team that competed for this year’s Edelman, accepted the award from Daniel H. Wagner President and Prize Committee Chair C. Allen Butler.

The prize-winning paper, “Product Line Design and Scheduling at Intel,” describes the development and implementation of a holistic, coherent model that incorporates market requirements and financials, design-engineering capabilities, manufacturing costs and multiple-time dynamics.