I really like the INFORMS Practice Meeting. It is much different than the regular INFORMS conference. The key difference is that not everyone speaks. At regular INFORMS (or EURO or IFORS), practically everyone there will give a 20-25 minute talk on their own research. At the Practice Meeting, speakers are carefully selected in order to present the best practical work, along with the most important methodological advances (generally in the form of tutorials). As an example of the talks, here is the “Supply Chain” track:
- Procter & Gamble – William Tarlton, Supply Chain R&D Manager, Personal Beauty Care Products, on implementing inventory optimization at P&G.
- Pepsi Bottling Group – Arzum Akkas, Senior Project Manager, Supply Chain Technology, on retail out-of-stock reduction in a direct store delivery environment .
- Pennsylvania State University –Terry Harrison, Professor of Business, Professor of Supply Chain & Information Systems, and Thomas Robbins, Instructor in Supply Chain & Information Systems, on services supply chain.
- Xilinx – Alex Brown, Principal Engineer and Supply Chain Architect, on collecting and using demand information from customers and distributors to improve forecasts and supply chain performance.
- IBM –Markus Ettl, Manager of Supply Chain Analytics & Architecture, IBM Research, and Blair Binney, Manager of Demand/Supply Planning Process Transformation, IBM Integrated Supply Chain, on how analytics and collaborative processes improve distributor and IBM performance in the supply chain.
- University of North Carolina – Brian Tomlin, Assistant Professor of Operations, Technology and Innovation Management, on supply chain risk management.
This is a great mix of academics and business executives, and I guarantee that the speakers will have spent significant time honing their presentations.
Of course, the conference is pretty pricey, but if you are doing (or considering doing) OR in practice, or if you teach courses on the practical use of OR, this is a must see conference. The hotel deadline is in a couple of days.
I’ll be there, and perhaps do a bit of live blogging along the way.