The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) presented the award earlier this month to Jeppesen President and CEO Horst Bergmann at the society’s national conference in Salt Lake City.
The Englewood, Colorado company, which manufactures and distributes flight manuals for over 300,000 pilots and 400 airlines worldwide, saw its customer service start to deteriorate in 1997 when its work volume grew to the point that it overwhelmed its production system.
In response, the company asked Robert "Gene" Woolsey, a Professor at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, for assistance in improving their production processes. Two years later, late orders had gone from 35% to zero. The company realized annual savings of $3 million, with projected future annual savings of $7 million.
The Times Mirror company won over other finalists IBM, Ford Motor, Air New Zealand, Fingerhut, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Jeppesen’s winning team consisted of Elena Katok, who was previously a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and is currently Assistant Professor of MIS at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University; William Tarantino, who was a doctoral student at Mines and is currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army and Operations Research Analyst at the Center for Army Analysis, Ft Belvoir Virginia; and Ralph Tiedeman, a Jeppesen Production Planner.
At the convention, Professor Woolsey told a plenary session how his approach to solving problems atand large organizations begins not with technology but with rolling up one’s sleeves and personally working at a company’s facilities.
Sometimes this work is less than glamorous and can result in embarrassment to operations researchers more adept at theory. At the plenary, Prof. Woolsey recounted an incident in which one of his students, assigned to improving operations at a beer producer, tested his ability on a forklift and accidentally dumped hundreds of gallons of beer on a railroad track.
The approach has paid off, though. Before allowing his students to graduate, Professor Woolsey assigns them to pro bono operations research projects in the profit or non-profit world and presents diamond pins to students who save their clients $1 million or more. Since the program began 30 years ago, Prof. Woolsey’s students have generated $270 million in benefits.
Lt. Col. Tarantino is the second of Professor Woolsey’s students to share the Edelman Award. The first was Gysbert J. Wessels, in 1996, for a project on behalf of the South African government of Nelson Mandela, which recognized the winning team for saving South Africa more than $1 billion a year.
Echoing the active approach that Prof. Woolsey pioneered and championed for over 25 years, the Jeppesen operations research team members themselves assembled the custom and pre-packaged aviation maps and materials that the company produces. Every week, the company mails updated revisions with 5 – 35 million pages to over 200,000 different airline pilots worldwide.
"Many professionals find it difficult to justify spending time to personally work in the area they are trying to improve," the team writes in their winning paper. "However we found that investing this time is essential to a thorough understanding and more efficient than relying on users to provide systems requirements."
The time was especially well spent because the team was faced with a built-to-order process for building flight manuals that required employees at times to go past 250,000 pigeonholes storing individual charts. Since an average manual has 700 charts, the process was time consuming and subject to errors.
Combining the Woolsey approach to implementation with such fundamental operations research techniques as simulation and optimization was essential to the team’s success. The Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey California, where Lt. Col. Tarantino studied, and Penn State University, where Prof. Katok earned her degree, provided a strong technical background for the team to tackle this difficult project.
The team streamlined the complex publication and collation process and justified investment in new technology. It provided strategic and economic analysis that tackled bottlenecks in the production process by introducing flexibility to the manufacturing process. Decision support tools developed by the team included capacity planning tools, a production cost planning system, an order fulfillment-scheduling model, and an inventory model. Concurrently, they developed a novel and general method for evaluating and justifying investments in production technology.
The INFORMS Salt Lake City conference marked the 29th year that the prestigious Franz Edelman Award competition has been held. The award is jointly sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. The INFORMS Edelman Award recognizes outstanding implemented work that has had a significant, positive impact on the performance of the client organization. The top finalist receives a $10,000 first prize.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 12,000 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, the stock market, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.