Winter 2008

REVENUE MANAGEMENT and digital marketing are independent business processes that leverage advanced analytic techniques to drive significant revenues for a variety of industries. Revenue management has been around since the early 1980s and has increasingly spread its influence from its original application in the airlines. Digital marketing is a relatively recent development and has arisen in response to advertising opportunities created on the World Wide Web. Digital marketing is a high-paced endeavor as advertisers try to cope with the almost daily changes to the advertising landscape. The one constant is the growing advertising budgets in a still under-subscribed opportunity to connect with customers and prospects.

• Kevin Geraghty

STEPHEN BAKER, a journalist who has written for Businessweek for more than 20 years, is a “words” guy, not a “numbers” guy, but Baker’s world took a quantitative turn in 2006 while he was researching a BW cover story entitled, appropriately enough, “Math Will Rock Your World.”

• Peter Horner

MANY TYPES OF ANALYTICS practitioners call big companies home. Some focus on building, maintaining and running large-scale models that they can use to support a set of operational decisions on an ongoing basis. For example, logistics analysts work to continuously optimize the routing of freight in a distribution network as supply and demand conditions change. Other practitioners are in an R&D role and focus on developing and refining products containing decision-support analytics for use by others in solving specific types of problems, oftentimes implemented through software. For example, optimization algorithms lie at the heart of revenue management systems used in the services industry and enterprise resource planning systems used in manufacturing. Yet other types of analytics practitioners may mine large datasets looking for insights into customer behavior or targets for new drug development.

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, the computational power and visualization capabilities supporting decision analysis software and have increased by many orders of magnitude. These advances have made decision analytic (and many other operations research) techniques accessible to a much broader community of users. In fact, we can see over the years that distribution numbers for many of the more mature software packages have grown from hundreds of likely specialized professional users a decade ago to many thousands of users worldwide today. This proliferation of software might lead one to believe that the professional decision analyst or even the operations research analyst might go the way of the blacksmith. Of course, this isn’t happening. Hard decisions don’t become easy because software and computers are more powerful. Hard decisions usually possess one or more of the following characteristics [1]: complexity, uncertainty, multiple competing objectives and multiple stakeholders. Because of this, hard decisions will keep us in business!

Weyerhaeuser Company is an enterprise that is actively engaged in all stages of the forest products business, from growing trees to building homes. The company was founded in 1900 and has grown to be a Fortune 100 company and a premier participant in the forest products industry. By 2006, Weyerhaeuser had grown to a company with $22 billion in sales, operating in five countries, owning more than six million acres of timberlands and actively managing an additional 30 million acres. Weyerhaeuser’s global operations are headquartered in Federal Way, Wash.

The INFORMS Conference on O.R. Practice, set for April 26-28, 2009 in Phoenix, Ariz., more than lives up to its name. Designed by practitioners for practitioners involved in the task of “applying science to the art of business,” the conference will bring together analysts of all stripes and interests for an intensive, high-value and diversified program.

• Peter Horner
• Terry Cryan