Volume 31, Number 6, December 2004

BUSINESS LEADERS IN AMERICA HAVE LONG KNOWN THAT BEING ABLE TO ADAPT TO CHANGING ENVIRONMENTS is the sine qua non of success. The evolution in customer needs and habits, in trade regulations, in national and international supply and demand, have required moving from long-term planning to just-in-time strategizing. New realities are now making strategy itself appear obsolete, turning businesses into adaptive systems that remain alert to shifting paradigms and play out different scenarios in a sense-and-respond mode.

• Grace Lin
• Ko-Yang Wang
• Robert Luby

LARGE RETAILERS ARE INCREASINGLY RECOGNIZING that efficient labor management can be a major source of competitive differentiation. In an industry where customer demand fluctuates greatly and workforce availability is equally variable, inadequate employee scheduling can lead to costly over- or understaffing. Overstaffing results in inflated payroll expenditures, as unnecessary employees occupy stores. Understaffing is an even greater concern, as inadequate staffing leads to poor customer service, causing reduced customer conversion rates and a potential loss of revenues. Inadequate employee scheduling can also lead to a lower quality of life for employees, resulting in high turnover rates and increased recruitment and training costs.

RICHARD C. LARSON OFTEN DESCRIBES operations research as both the “world’s greatest profession” and the “world’s most important hidden profession.” As a recognized world leader on both the academic and practice sides of the O.R. fence, Larson takes great pride in the first part of the description and, like many of his colleagues in INFORMS, is determined to do something to change the second.

• Peter Horner

Forecasting time series data continues to be a topic of great interest to OR/MS Today practitioners and academics. The examples and applications are varied and huge. For example, here are some recent forecasting problems I personally worked on: estimating potential investment returns, planning for retirement, tracking data in the recent presidential election, looking at enrollment and retention figures in our university, and monitoring my TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone) levels. The teaching of at least some forecasting techniques is ingrained in most MBA curricula, and some topics have even filtered down into some high school math courses.

• Jack Yurkiewicz

In the December 2003 issue, I reviewed Mathematica 5 from operations research professionals’ viewpoint [1]. I wrote how version 5 is compelling for O.R. professionals who may have been intrigued by Mathematica software in the past but did not consider it useful for their profession, at least not over the numerical and statistical packages they already use. I was initially hesitant to review version 5.1, but the additional features in terms of the Internet, graphical user interface (GUI) development, and data handling and visualization alone can be considered as a major upgrade in contrast to what the version increment would suggest.

• ManMohan Sodhi