Robert Tarjan

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.

"Robert Tarjan is the world's leading expert in the design, analysis, and use of data structures. In his book Data Structures and Network Algorithms (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1983), he conclusively demonstrates how the use of appropriate data structures can lead to substantial gains in the efficiency of algorithms. The book is divided into two parts, the first introducing a collection of fundamental data structures and the second illustrating their application to the problems of finding minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, network flows, and maximum matchings. In each section the reader is led from the classical results to state-of-the-art, heretofore available only in technical papers (many by Tarjan himself). Tarjan has a gift for seeing through the details to what is essential and important, and the resulting unified presentation is both comprehensive and a model of precision and clarity."