In the face of a very competitive Western European market, French automaker Renault decided in 1999 to launch the "New Delivery Project" aimed at offering its customers all the diversity of the product range while shortening delivery times. Lead times between the customer order and the arrival in dealerships were to be reduced from six weeks on average to three weeks in Western Europe. The three weeks include the production and transportation of the customer vehicle.
Volume 33, Number 2, April 2006
FEATURE ARTICLES
DIGITAL EDITION
DEPARTMENTS 
Inside Story
'Global' Optimization
Sixteen row boats set out from La Gomera in the Canary Islands, headed for Port Charles in Barbados, 2,500 nautical miles away. Forty days later, Team Holiday Shoppe from New Zealand crossed the finish line first in world-record time. Holiday Shoppe was so dominant that the second-place finisher figured that the winners must have cheated. After all, how else could you explain Holiday Shoppe's huge margin of victory? Holiday Shoppe didn't cheat, but they did have a secret weapon: operations research. The key to the team's success: a set of routing charts developed using stochastic optimization techniques.
President's Desk
How We Can Avert A National Crisis
The call came in on my wife's cell phone as we were driving back to Chicago from northern Wisconsin. Our then newly minted high school graduate was calling to tell us that she had just received her calculus AP scores and that she did "well enough so that I no longer have to take math again in my life." While I was pleased she had done well, I was disappointed in her decision about future math courses.
Issues in Education
O.R. and Study Abroad
Each summer, the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Georgia Tech organizes a study abroad program in Singapore and Beijing. The travel and the differences in operations in different countries and cultures offer a unique environment to motivate the learning of O.R. principles in areas such as scheduling, layout, routing and inventory control.
INFORMS Online
Site Sports New Look and Feel
If you've visited www.informs.org in the last few weeks, perhaps you've noticed something new. It's been a long time in coming (I proposed this project as a goal in my first column as editor of IOL in February 2001). The new graphic design is the product of a long series of prototypes. We began the search for the design in 2001 with a student project conducted through the Maryland Institute College of Art. Design efforts moved in-house after that. The look evolved through several reviews involving IOL associate editors and INFORMS staff until we settled on the version you see here. The artistic credit belongs primarily to INFORMS staffers Shirley Mohr and Kevin Addison. The top-level organization and the navigation system evolved over the same period, with the same review process. The most recent change addresses a pet peeve of mine: the term "subdivisions" to describe groups of members with professional or geographic affinity has always seemed awkward. The term has been dropped in favor of "communities."
Cyberspace
'It's Just Surveillance' in Global e-Commerce
The other day a student told me that he had set up a successful business on eBay only to see it crash down. PayPal froze his account without warning so he could neither get his money out to pay his suppliers nor accept customers' money. After more than six months, PayPal removed the block without any clarification. Besides the business going bust and related costs, he lost two terms at school. Now he has to fight in court to get some compensation, but all he can realistically expect is interest on the money that was blocked.
Was It Something I Said
Mourning Loss of Peer-Turned-Mentor
For as long as I'd known him, Perwez was always way, way ahead of me. When I first met him, I was in the first week of graduate school . . . and he had already finished his master's degree. As my classmates and I struggled through our coursework, Perwez was proving theorems about Rare Event Simulation. As a graduate student at Stanford working with Peter Glynn, he presented a paper at the 1988 Winter Simulation Conference (my first WSC paper would come in 2003, where Perwez - now a grizzled veteran - greeted me warmly). While I was thrashing about in search of a dissertation topic, Perwez won first prize in the 1990 INFORMS George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition for his dissertation work.
Roundtable Profile
Decision Sciences at Air Products
Air Products serves customers in technology, energy, healthcare and industrial markets worldwide with a unique portfolio of products, services and solutions, providing atmospheric gases, process and specialty gases, performance materials and chemical intermediates. Founded in 1940, Air Products has built leading positions in key growth markets such as semiconductor materials, refinery hydrogen, home healthcare services, natural gas liquefaction and advanced coatings and adhesives. The company is recognized for its innovative culture, operational excellence and commitment to safety and the environment, and is listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability and FTSE4Good Indices. The company has annual revenues of $8.1 billion, operations in more than 30 countries, and has more than 20,000 employees around the globe.
ORacle
Red Adair's Parable
The two O.R. analysts were enjoying what is, for many, the best part of a professional conference: having found their common interest in a session they attended, they were now continuing the discussion in a nearby bar. This particular bar was a neighborhood place that seemed to attract many of the locals, a bit of a change from what the conference hotel had to offer.