Mark Doherty, Executive Director of INFORMS made the announcement at a ceremony honoring Warner Robins Air Force Logistics Center, which won the 2006 Edelman Award Competition.
The winner of the Franz Edelman competition will be announced at a special awards banquet during the INFORMS Conference on O.R. Practice in Vancouver from April 29-May 1. http://meetings.informs.org/Practice07/
Every year, the Franz Edelman competition recognizes outstanding examples of Operations Research (O.R.)-based projects that have transformed companies, entire industries and people’s lives. O.R. uses advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions and is a disciplined way by which management can improve organizational performance in a wide variety of situations, in nearly any type of organization in the public or private sector.
Past Franz Edelman finalists have included Travelocity, whose Enterprise Network Model yielded over $40 million in connection with its travel website; IBM; Merrill Lynch; and, on the non-profit side, a team from the city of New Haven and Yale who won for preventing AIDS through an innovative needle exchange program.
“O.R. is more important today than at any time since it first came to prominence during World War II,” said Doherty. “For the last 36 years we’ve recognized the best work in the discipline and many of our award winners have proved transformative.”
Ranging widely in industry and geographic origin, the 2007 Franz Edelman finalists are:
- Coca-Cola, for a project entitled “Optimizing Distribution at Coca-Cola Enterprises”
- The U.S. Coast Guard, for “Maximizing Aircraft Availability by Managing Aircraft Maintenance Throughput at the U.S. Coast Guard Aircraft Repair and Supply Center”
- Hewlett-Packard, for “Procurement Risk Management at Hewlett-Packard Company”
- Daimler Chrysler and J.D. Power and Associates for “PIN Incentive Planning System: A Decision Support System for Planning Automobile Manufacturers' Pricing and Promotions”
- Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for “Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics”
A sixth finalist team of Halifax Bank of Scotland and Nomis Solutions, which was named for “Halifax Bank of Scotland Increases Profits in Consumer Lending through Price Optimization,” declined to participate in the competition.
Brian T. Denton of the Mayo Clinic is Chair of the Franz Edelman Award Committee. The Edelman Judging Committee includes Srinivas Bollapragada, General Electric; Jeffrey Camm, University of Cincinnati and Editor-in-Chief, Interfaces; Mary Crissey, SAS; Stephen Graves, MIT; Peter Norden, Columbia University; Graham Rand, Lancaster University; Anne Robinson, CISCO; and Dr. Denton.
Additional information about the Edelman Competition can be found online at http://www.scienceofbetter.org/Edelman.
About INFORMS
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is www.informs.org. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.
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