HP offers a wide spectrum of innovative products to meet diverse customer needs. While this has helped the company achieve unparalleled market reach, it has come with significant costs and challenges. HP developed two powerful OR-based solutions for product variety management that address the diverse needs of its businesses throughout their products' lifecycles. The first uses custom-built ROI calculators to evaluate each proposed new product before it is introduced. The second, HP's Revenue Coverage Optimization (RCO) tool, is used to manage product variety after it has been introduced. By identifying a core portfolio of products most important to order coverage, RCO enables HP businesses to increase operational focus on the most critical products in their offerings. Using these tools, HP achieved over $500M in profit improvements across several business units since 2005. HP also streamlined its product offering, improved execution, achieved faster delivery performance, lowered overhead, and increased customer satisfaction and market share.
The purpose of the Franz Edelman competition is to bring forward, recognize and reward outstanding examples of operations research, management science and advanced analytics in practice in the world, with $15,000 in awards. First prize is accompanied by a $10,000 honorarium.
Videos and DVDs of past competitions, suitable for teaching, marketing, or publicizing OR/MS practice successes, are available for purchase from INFORMS.
http://www3.informs.org/site/edelman_dvd/
View Edelman Award Presentations from 2010-Present, complete with slides: http://www.informs.org/Apply-Operations-Research/INFORMS-Video-Learning-Center
Learn more about the Franz Edelman Award:
http://www.informs.org/Edelman
Learn more about INFORMS, The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences: http://www.informs.org