News Room

FedEx has unveiled an early model of an autonomous delivery robot. The shipper is teaming up with Pizza Hut, Walmart, Walgreens and other companies on the delivery program. The initiative highlights the surging demand for speedier delivery and the race to develop autonomous technology for what’s known as the “last-mile,” or the final step of the logistics journey from warehouse or kitchen to a customer’s front door.

Jeffrey Camm, INFORMS Fellow and Associate Dean of Business Analytics and Inmar Presidential Chair in Analytics at the Wake Forest University School of Business, discusses the expanding role of analytics in manufacturing, including prescriptive analytics, automation and artificial intelligence. 

Jane Mather, INFORMS member and Founder and Principal of Critical Core, encourages businesses looking to improve space usage and management to look beyond new workplace software and tools, especially in complex situations, or they could be looking at millions of dollars lost. 

A new study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science conducted research designed to examine the challenge of how to most efficiently use user generated content (UGC) to identify customer needs in ways that are more cost-efficient and accurate.

Kayse Lee Maass, an INFORMS member and assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, believes engineers have tools that can help fight human trafficking. The same techniques used to model supply chains or plan media campaigns can be adapted to find ways to disrupt trafficking networks or organize support services for survivors.