Jeppesen
Sanderson, Inc. maintains, manufactures, and distributes flight manuals
containing safety information for over 300,000 pilots and 400 airlines
worldwide.Its service deteriorated
when a growing line of over 100,000 aviation charts overwhelmed its production
system.We developed optimization-based
decision support tools that improved production planning.Concurrently,
we developed a method for evaluating investments in production technology.Our
work reduced lateness and improved production processes, which led to a
decrease in customer complaints, a reduction in costs of nearly 10 percent,
an increase in profit of 24 percent, and the creation of a new OR group.Today,
OR-based decision support systems are spreading to all areas of the company.
Elena
Katok, William Tarantino and Ralph Tiedeman, “Improving
performance and Flexibility at Jeppesen: the world's leading aviation information
company” Interfaces Edelman Issue, Vol. 31, No. 1,Jan-Feb
2001.
Elena
Katok, William Tarantino and Terry P. Harrison,“Investment
in production resource flexibility: An empirical investigation of methods
for planning under uncertainty,” Under invited revision at Naval
Research Logistics.
Elena
Katok, Andrew Lathrop William Tarantino and Susan H. Xu, “Implementing
a decision support system for inventory management in the aviation information
industry,” forthcoming Interfaces
Elena
Katok and Susan H. Xu “Managing
Inventory in the Information Age: a system with product life-cycle uncertainty
and stochastic time-varying demand,”
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