INSIDE STORY

What a difference a few words make.

Organizers of the erstwhile INFORMS “spring practice” conference add the words “business analytics” to the name of the event, officially making it the “INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research,” and attendance jumps nearly 50 percent from 2010 to 2011. Is it really that simple?

Of course not. The location (Chicago), the improving economy, the revamped conference program and extensive marketing efforts through a variety of channels all played a role, but “analytics” seems to be an irresistible business buzzword these days that attracts corporate types like bees to honey.

INFORMS President Rina Schneur looks into the record attendance in greater detail in this month’s President’s Desk column (see page 6) and reports that 60 percent of the 2011 attendees had never attended the INFORMS “spring practice” conference and that a third of this year’s attendees were not members of INFORMS. That doesn’t surprise me since several of the newcomers I met in Chicago had little knowledge of the Institute or “operations research” before they saw those magic words “business analytics” in the title and decided that this was a conference they had to attend.

No one had to tell the Edelman Award finalists what INFORMS and operations research are all about. This year marked the 40th anniversary of the prestigious competition, considered the “Super Bowl” of operations research applications. The six Edelman teams that made it to Chicago put in a considerable amount of time over the past year compiling their applications, meeting with verifiers and working with coaches to hone their presentations for the competition held in conjunction with the conference.

The Edelman Awards Gala has been a highlight of the revamped INFORMS spring/practice/O.R./business analytics conference since 2006, and this year was no exception. In Oscar-like fashion, senior representatives from the six finalists – each accompanied by a dozen or so team members along with video snippets of their formal presentations earlier that day before a panel of judges – briefly described their O.R. work to a ballroom full of conference attendees.

How do you pick between the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China that developed a customized branch network optimization system that produced 16,000 better performing branches across China and, say, the New York State Department of Taxation, which developed a tax collections optimization solution that boosted annual revenue by 8 percent? How do you choose between a Chilean shipping company such as CSAV that used an O.R. model to efficiently reposition its empty containers, thus cutting its number of empty, unprofitable containers by 50 percent, and the InterContinental Hotels Group, which overhauled its revenue management system, resulting in a 2.7 percent increase in revenue?

Suffice to say the Edelman competition was first rate and the judges – no strangers to fact-based, data-driven decision-making – had a difficult decision to make.
And the winner is … Sorry. You’ll have to turn to page 30.

— Peter Horner, editor
horner@lionhrtpub.com