2020 Edelman Award Winner Intel Breaks Down their Analytics Plan that’s Saving the Company Billions

The virtual Edelman Competition was held at the end of September, but Wednesday night at the Awards Ceremony during the Virtual 2020 INFORMS Annual Meeting, Intel formally accepted the 2020 Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science. Thursday afternoon, the team gave a talk about their work and the project that led them to win the prestigious INFORMS award.

The presentation began with an interview by Annual Meeting host Glenn Wegryn, CAP, with Karl Kempf, Senior Fellow and director of Decision Engineering at Intel Corporation. He spoke about the company’s use of operations research (O.R.) to maximize revenue and minimize cost in corporate decision-making.

After the interview, several members of the Intel team spoke about the different ways the company utilizes advanced analytics. The headline of their project is that Intel realizes $25 billion by applying advanced analytics from product architecture design through supply chain planning.

“I’m sharing my enthusiasm of the innovative work of our advanced analytics team and I think as we get through some of the impacts of it, you’ll see that that enthusiasm is well founded,” said Intel CFO George Davis.

Intel’s success is dependent on three main areas running smoothly: manufacturing processes, product architecture, and planning and scheduling. Davis says the advanced analytics team has delivered solutions that impact all three of these critical areas.

In response to an increase in complexities in the three main areas, Intel used advanced analytics to develop the plan with the goals of maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. Intel’s approach integrates the generation and optimization of product design alternatives using genetic algorithms and device physics simulation with large-scale supply chain planning using problem decomposition and mixed-integer programming.

This is a corporate-wide capability. It is fast and effective, enabling analysis of many more business scenarios in much less time than previous solutions, while providing superior results, including faster response time to customers.

This solution was implemented across the majority of Intel’s product portfolio. So far, the company has seen annual revenue increase by an average of $1.9 billion and reduced annual costs by $1.5 billion, for a total benefit of $25.4 billion since 2009, while also contributing to Intel’s sustainability efforts.

Kempf (shown above) alongside John Heiney, Evan Rash and Shamin Shirodkar, all from Intel, stuck around for questions after the presentation.

Upon being named the 2020 Edelman Award winner, Davis said, “The system has been vital to improving the process of corporate decision-making, and the results have been in the billions since the system began. It is an innovative, cost-effective and sustainable strategy that uses operations research and data analytics to create efficiency across the corporation.”