A Supply Chain Christmas List 2022
As we head rapidly into the Holiday season, I will note that every few years about this time I offer my supply chain Christmas list for Santa’s consideration, and am doing so here again in 2022.
We are drowning in numbers, and we no longer understand what they mean. Every day, headlines bombard us with figures meant to inform: billions in spending, trillions in debt, percentages signaling growth or decline. But for most of us, these numbers blur together. They register as “large” or “small,” but almost never as real. And that is more than a math problem. It is a civic one.
INFORMS has awarded Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) its 2026 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, for reengineering how global cloud infrastructure is planned and delivered, applying advanced analytics and AI to orchestrate complex fulfillment decisions across its rapidly expanding data center network.
In the rush to adopt artificial intelligence, many employers are now requiring that employees use AI tools. As you’re using AI, be intentional and selective. It’s critical that you know yourself. Research published in Management Science found that AI is most valuable for people who understand their own abilities and limitations. Assess yourself, so you can factor this into your process for incorporating AI into your work.
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As we head rapidly into the Holiday season, I will note that every few years about this time I offer my supply chain Christmas list for Santa’s consideration, and am doing so here again in 2022.
In 1994, the founder of Interface, a manufacturer of carpet, rubber and vinyl tiles, launched ‘Mission Zero’ and set himself the goal of eliminating the company’s negative impact on the planet by 2020. He succeeded, which meant it’s time for a new initiative: Climate Take Back, aimed at helping to reverse global warming. One of its pillars is to use CO2 as a resource and raw material rather than viewing it as an enemy. This has huge implications for products, and thus for the total supply chain. How is Eline Oudenbroek, VP of Operations, leading the organization through all these changes?
Political redistricting is a problem of national interest with consequences to electoral representation. It is a decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts, and can affect a wide range of stakeholders, including the voters, candidates and political parties. New research in the INFORMS journal Operations Research introduces a model that can be adopted for a redistricting process that explicitly focuses on political fairness.
When politics or production go haywire in China, Apple CEO Tim Cook most often takes the “grin and bear it” approach.
Baltimore [US], November 27 (ANI): The chief executive officer of ‘Goya’, a sizable Latin food brand in the US, publicly complimented and endorsed then-president Donald Trump during a campaign rally during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Both a boycott and a counter-boycott movement in favor of the brand were started in response to the comments.

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