INFORMS News: People
Jack Levis
Jack Levis, director of process management at UPS and the vice president of Practice Activities for INFORMS, received the 2011 Gartner Business Intelligence (BI) Excellence Award on behalf of UPS following a presentation and subsequent vote of more than a thousand delegates at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit held in Los Angeles.
The award recognizes the most successful recent BI implementations by organizations that demonstrate high levels of business impact and overall excellence in the integration of business, decision, analytical and information processes. Fifty-five organizations submitted nominations for the 2011 event. A committee of Gartner analysts evaluated the nominations before announcing 10 semifinalists and then three finalists –Yahoo!, fashion designer Elie Tahari and UPS – who were invited to present their BI case at the 2011 Summit.
Conference attendees, who packed the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel for the three presentations, were given ballots and asked to vote for the finalist who demonstrated the best example of BI excellence. Later that evening, after the votes were tallied, UPS was announced as the winner before another ballroom full of attendees.
In his presentation, Levis outlined how UPS used BI and advanced analytics such as operations research to build systems and processes that made its operations more efficient (including a 30-million mile reduction in annual miles driven) while offering more products and delivering better service. Levis noted that one of the biggest challenges UPS faced was taking specific route and delivery information held only in each driver’s head and putting it into integrated databases that were used to run the operation in real time. As Levis noted, with this process change, UPS went from a “manual-, methods- and procedure-driven operations to a data-driven, scientific process.”
Levis concluded his award-winning presentation with a video of UPS drivers – most of them 20- and 25-year veteran drivers – extolling the virtues of “optimization” to improve the way they did their jobs.
Jane C. Ammons
Jane C. Ammons has been named the chair of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech, effective July 1. Ammons received her Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1982 and joined the ISyE faculty that year as an assistant professor. She currently holds the rank of professor in ISyE and also has served as associate dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Engineering since 2004. Ammons will also hold the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart Chair in ISyE.
Ammons is the author or co-author of more than 100 refereed and technical publications in the area of supply chain engineering with a special interest in developing closed loop and environmentally sustainable systems, and she has been advisor for 13 doctoral graduates. She has served on numerous school, college and Institute committees, including being the ADVANCE professor representing the College of Engineering in this NSF-funded program. She has been principal or co-principal investigator on a variety of sponsored research programs, having enjoyed support from both industry and federal funding agencies.
In addition to her research and institutional service activities, Ammons has been highly active in professional service external to Georgia Tech. Ammons is a past-president of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). She is a member of the Technical Committee for the Uganda: Millennium Science Initiative (MSI) Project co-financed by the World Bank and serves as a program evaluator for ABET, the engineering education accreditation organization.
At Georgia Tech, Ammons has been honored with eight teaching/faculty awards at the school and university levels. In addition to her academic experience, Ammons has worked as a plant engineer for an industrial manufacturer and is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Georgia.
The H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) is the largest academic program of its kind in the world with a strong foundation in optimization, stochastics, simulation and statistics.
Source: Georgia Tech
Rajan Suri
Rajan Suri was been inducted into IndustryWeek’s 2010 Manufacturing Hall of Fame. IW’s Hall of Fame recognizes individuals who embody the best of U.S. manufacturing. Thanks to their leadership, vision, talent, work ethic and innovative ideas, the members of the 2010 Hall of Fame class have both created new manufacturing organizations and made existing ones more productive, more efficient, more competitive and more profitable.
Suri, an INFORMS member and a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was honored for the development of the “Quick Response Manufacturing” (QRM) strategy and his long-standing efforts in helping U.S. manufacturers stay competitive in the global marketplace.
Suri, a leader of the renaissance of U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, is the founding director of the Center for Quick Response Manufacturing. The consortium is comprised of 300 companies that have worked with the University of Wisconsin on understanding and implementing QRM strategies. Suri’s contribution to the field was first recognized in 2006 when he received the Albert M. Sargent Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He also has received awards from the American Automatic Control Council, the Institute of Management Sciences and the IEEE.
Suri’s latest book, “It’s About Time: The Competitive Advantage of Quick Response Manufacturing,” lays out the principles of the system. QRM is designed to help companies making low-volume and custom-engineered products reduce both external and internal lead times. “The true value of the system is how it impacts the way people view time, which causes them to change how they work,” Suri explains.
Suri’s journey began while working on the shop floor trying to help improve lead times. The biggest obstacles were management principles that in his opinion were outdated and obsolete, so he brought his experience in engineering and control theory and combined it with management principles and created a new system. “The information was out there, I just connected the dots,” Suri adds.
Suri received his bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Others in the 2010 Class Hall of Fame include Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computer), Donald Fites (former CEO of Caterpillar) and Rich Teerlink (past chairman/CEO of Harley-Davidson). The inaugural 2009 Hall of Fame Class included Steve Jobs (Apple Computer), Lee Iacocca (former head of Chrysler) and Jack Welch (former head of GE).
