Have you ever wondered how your favorite bag of potato chips ends up on the grocery shelf, or why you feel a stitch of annoyance when your preferred pasta brand is missing? Behind each of those everyday moments is an intricate network of people, data and processes working hard to keep products flowing with minimal disruption.
Volume 52, Issue 3, 2025
FEATURE ARTICLES
DOWNLOAD ISSUE PDF
DEPARTMENTS 
Inside Story
Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges
One of the things I love most about editing OR/MS Today is the sheer range of stories that come across my desk. At first glance, they might seem worlds apart – an Olympic cycling team’s gold medal, the optimization of consumer supply chains in the age of generative AI or a student-led forecasting project in Colombia. But somehow, I’m always able to find a unifying thread. This time? The creative, often unexpected, ways the OR/MS community takes mathematical models, algorithms and analytics out into the world to solve problems that matter. This issue reinforces the importance of industry-academia collaboration in guiding the trajectory of the field in the age of artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum optimization.
President's Desk
INFORMS’ Actions for a Shifting Global Landscape
2025 INFORMS President Dave Hunt reflects on recent international trips, given him an even greater appreciation of the role INFORMS plays in the global operations research community and the respect carried by the INFORMS brand. Of course, there are also concerns about the U.S. and other countries’ governmental policies, especially around obtaining visas to participle in INFORMS events in the U.S., and the rising cost of travel.
HQ Highlights
The Member-Driven Mission of Professional Associations
A core function of any professional association is to provide stewardship of the profession. This responsibility serves the public good by ensuring that members are well informed, educated and guided by shared ethics. It requires a strategic vision shaped collaboratively by members, volunteer leaders and staff. If a member feels that their association isn’t focused on the right priorities, the most effective response is to speak up. Associations rely on this input to remain aligned with their members. No association can succeed without understanding the diverse voices within its community.
Forum
Reinventing Operations: Merging Tradition with Digital Innovation
Traditional operations management (OM), long grounded in principles of efficiency, standardization and cost minimization, is now being redefined by digital technologies. This convergence has given rise to the field of digital operations, blending classical operations management methodologies with cutting-edge innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and data analytics. This article explores how these two domains – operations management and digital operations – complement each other and shape the future of operational excellence.
Viewpoint
Combining Generative AI with Six Sigma to Create New Smart Quality Management Systems
This article explores how integrating Six Sigma with generative AI can enhance process improvement by making quality systems smarter, faster, and more adaptable. It highlights practical applications and real-world examples across various industries.
Analytics Advice
Leading in Analytics: 12 Lessons for Building and Leading High-Impact Analytics Teams
Sadly, despite the incredible transformational power of artificial intelligence (AI), more than four out of five AI and analytics projects fail to deliver the value their sponsors expect. This isn’t just an individual or organizational challenge – it’s a systemic problem the entire analytics profession can and must address. Fortunately, there’s a growing body of knowledge about why these projects fail and how to lead them to success.
Innovative Education
Forecasting Social Impact
At the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech, classroom theory regularly meets real-world impact. Each semester, through the Business Analytics Practicum course, students transform data into action, partnering with organizations across the globe to solve pressing problems. For spring 2025, that mission brought a team of undergraduate students to the heart of Latin America’s most dynamic social innovation hub: Comfama, a nonprofit compensation fund in Colombia.
Analytics in Action
The Art of Asking Smarter Questions in Decision Intelligence
This article explores the critical yet often overlooked skill of asking smarter questions to improve data-driven decisions. Drawing from experience in supply chain, fraud strategy and manufacturing, we illustrate how well-crafted questions transform raw data into actionable insights. Through practical strategies and case studies, the article illustrates how precise questioning bridges the gap between data and decision-making.
Member Insights
The Unexpected Soft Skills You Need to Succeed in Data
I began my career as a composer, writing music for short films. My dream was to go to Hollywood one day and help make the movies I loved. However, it was challenging. I decided to pivot to data. This is the story of how music gave me an edge and made my data career a unique success.
INFORMS Initiatives
A New Hope? Insights from the 2025 Edition of INFORMS Journals’ Impact Factors
Two years ago, we warned that INFORMS journals were entering a turbulent period due to changes in impact factor methodology, and predicted that “the decline could continue for many journals next year until impact factors stabilize in 2025.” Last year, we reported that this prediction was realized and offered a few thoughts on how our community could respond. With the most recent impact factors now published, the third part of our impact factor trilogy offers a new hope: As we predicted in 2023, the decline has markedly slowed, and several journals have rebounded.
Conference Preview
INFORMS Returns to Atlanta for 2025 Annual Meeting
After more than 20 years, Atlanta is excited to host the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting and welcome conference-goers back on October 26-29, 2025! The city is expecting to host more than 6,000 members of the INFORMS community, including academic scholars, students, and industry leaders and experts. The meeting is expected to serve as a catalyst for continuing innovations in the fields of operations research (O.R.), analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of making smarter decisions for a better world.
Tech Tips
Translating Raw Data into Narratives That Drive Stakeholder Decisions
Data analysts play a pivotal role in transforming complex datasets into clear, actionable narratives that inform decision-making. In an era dominated by information overload, the ability to tell a compelling data story can be the difference between decisions that drive success and missed opportunities.
Subject to ...
Primal-Dual Partnerships
Holmes and Watson, Calvin and Hobbes, Batman and Robin, Doc and Marty, Simon and Garfunkel: They are some of the most iconic duos in books, comics, movies and music. These partnerships show how unity is strength to solve riddles, improve the safety of a city, travel back in time, or compose and sing beautiful harmonies. But what about research? We can provide many examples of partners in crime. Better, we may call them partners in science.
Student Perspectives
Crafting an Academic Cover Letter
Not all jobs and roles require a cover letter, but when one does, submitting a strong cover letter gives you a chance to strengthen your application and stand out. Although a curriculum vitae (CV) briefly lists your credentials and skill set, a cover letter gives you the chance to create a narrative that shows your professional journey and lets the recruiters get to know you and why they should hire you.
Last Word
Progressive Reasoning: An Iterative Approach to Real-World Challenges
Linear problem-solving does not cope well with the unclear, complex, messy and constantly evolving problems that we face in the real world. We need a process to learn more. In this third article in our series on the meta-problem approach, I will discuss how to start from a vague problem and move to something more concrete.