Winner of the 2000 Franz Edelman Award

29th Annual International Competition for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. 

Title: Improving flexibility and performance at the world's leading aviation information company

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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