In Memoriam: Lee Schwarz, 1941–2023

Leroy (Lee) Schwarz passed away on December 16, 2023, in Lafayette, Indiana. Over the course of his career, Lee has had a profound impact on the field of operations management as an inspirational teacher, as an important researcher, and as an influential citizen serving the operations management community.

Lee earned three degrees (BA, MBA, and PhD) from the University of Chicago. His academic career started when he joined the faculty of the Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College in 1970. Subsequently, he moved to the University of Rochester in 1973 and then to the Krannert School at Purdue University in 1977. In 2005, he was named the Louis A. Weil, Jr. Professor of Management, a position he held until his retirement in May 2012. At Purdue, Lee served in leadership roles on a variety of educational and research initiatives, covering manufacturing, e-business, and healthcare-product supply chains.

Lee is universally recognized for having been the founding editor-in-chief for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. He was exceptional in this role, setting the standards for the journal, building community support and interest, and executing to deliver a high-quality product. This was not an easy task, and, indeed, INFORMS nearly pulled the plug on the journal, due to its slow launch. Lee recalls these challenges and struggles in Schwarz (2020). Lee persisted and never deviated from his vision to create the premier outlet for operations management research. Today’s journal is a testament to his leadership.

Research Impact

Lee is highly recognized for his research contributions. His earliest work was on deterministic-demand multiechelon inventory problems, effectively extending the most fundamental inventory model, the economic-order-quantity model, to inventory systems with multiple stocking points. Lee’s contributions were fundamental to this area of inventory theory, developing theoretical results on the structure of the optimal policies and providing practical algorithms for finding good solutions.

He continued his multiechelon research with a number of important developments for stochastic-demand problems focused on operational policies for a central warehouse that supplies local retail sites. He developed models that yield both effective policies and useful insights for understanding the value from risk pooling in such inventory systems.

Beyond his own research, Lee organized and hosted a multiechelon inventory conference at Purdue in May 1979, which attracted many of the leading researchers at the time. Subsequently, he collected several of the talks from the conference, as well as other submissions, in an edited research volume that contains many influential contributions (Schwarz 1981).

Lee also performed fundamental research on automated storage and retrieval systems. In a series of papers, he established the practical effectiveness of a class-based storage-assignment policy. A key finding was that the system performance with only two or three classes can be near optimal.

His later research efforts provided useful guidelines for supply chain questions, such as: How might a manufacturer assist and contract with a subcontractor who is responsible for developing and supplying a subsystem? How should a newsvendor order from a set of unreliable suppliers?

Lee continued to work on emerging issues in supply chains related to privacy-preserving technology, as well as healthcare. His research on “Secure Supply Chain Collaboration” provided a framework for supply chain partners to make collaborative decisions without disclosing private information to one another and without the aid of a trusted third party. His research on healthcare supply chains examined the impact of group purchasing organizations (GPOs) on healthcare providers’ total purchasing costs.

Educational and Community Impact

In addition to his research impact, Lee has been a stellar educator. For the Krannert Master’s program, he was recognized 19 times as a Distinguished or Very Distinguished Teacher. He has also been particularly innovative in curriculum design, including designing and offering new MBA electives on (1) healthcare supply chains and (2) sourcing and procurement. For the core operations management (OM) class, he developed the information/control/buffer paradigm as a framework for teaching operations (Schwarz 1998). Finally, throughout his career, Lee has been an incredibly generous, caring, and thoughtful mentor to his students and colleagues—as each of us can testify.

Lee’s commitment to education is further evidenced by his efforts, with Kalyan Singhal, in organizing the 1996 production and operations management (POM) conference in Indianapolis, with a theme “Teaching POM: Visions, Topics, and Pedagogies.” This conference attracted 250 participants who came together to share their practices and innovations on teaching POM and discussed their visions for the future of POM education. To capture the good ideas from the conference, Lee and Kalyan edited a special issue of Production and Operations Management (1998), vol. 7, no. 2. This issue highlights many of the challenges of teaching operations, many of which remain current today.

After retiring from Purdue in 2012, Lee continued to do good for his community: he regularly remarked about the joy he got from reading to kindergarten classes and helping seniors with their tax forms. He loved music and even released his own CD in 2011 (Ratliff 2011).

We are saddened by the loss of our former teacher, advisor, mentor, and colleague. Lee will be missed, but his impact on us and on our profession will last forever.

Suresh Chand started association with Lee in 1979 as an assistant professor at Krannert. Maqbool Dada interviewed with Lee in 1992, prior to appointment at Krannert as an associate professor. Vinayak Deshpande joined as Lee’s faculty colleague at Purdue in 1999. Stephen Graves attended Lee’s Intro OM class as an MBA student at the Tuck School in January 1973. Ranganath Nuggehalli met Lee as a first-year PhD student in 1985 and still remembers the first meeting and many subsequent ones. Nicholas Petruzzi started association with Lee in 1992 as a first-year PhD student at Krannert.