Operations Research in Supply Chain Management and Marketing

The Landelijk Netwerk Mathematische Besliskunde (LNMB) and the Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB) jointly organize the one-day seminar "Operations Research in Supply Chain Management and Marketing ", in Conference Center “De Werelt” in Lunteren, on January 20, 2011.  The seminar is the 13th in a series of annual seminars, following the previous successful seminars on “Operations Research & Enterprise Resource Planning” (1999), “Operations Research in Financial Management” (2000), “E-commerce & Operations Research” (2001), “Capacity management – How operations research models support decision makers” (2002), “New developments in Operations Research software” (2003), "On-line methods: Challenges for OR in a real-time world" (2004), "Mathematical Models for Financial Optimization" (2005), "Operations Research and Health Care" (2006), "Operations Research and Public Transportation" (2007), "Operations Research and Energy" (2008), "Operations Research and Traffic" (2009) and "Operations Research and Health Care"(2010).

ABOUT THE THEME

This year is organized around two themes namely Marketing and Supply Chain Management. Each topic delivers two key-note speakers, and one or two parallel sessions with speakers from various backgrounds. What remains is the relation between OR and practice.
Supply Chain Management is one of the major area's in business where OR techniques are applied frequently and in many different ways: traditionally inventory management, planning and scheduling, transportation use many techniques from OR for their quantitative analyses. Nowadays Supply Chain Management is an area with a lot of new developments: new paradigms, based on sustainability such as cradle-to-cradle, carbon-footprint reduction etcetera. We focus on logistics services and planning the complete Supply Chain. For good reasons these are two of the three themes on which Dinalog aims at, the institute on Supply Chain Research, where operations researchers from universities and the corporate world do joint projects. Prof. Steef van de Velde, the former scientific director of Dinalog, will be the host of the day. Prof. Jan Fransoo will introduce new topics in supply chain control. Prof. Geert-Jan an Houtum will discuss new issues in services supply chains. Around this theme we also organise a parallel session in the afternoon.
The second theme is Operations Research in Marketing. Marketing has long been part of our profession. Reading "Operations Research in marketing: What's up" written by John. D. C. Little (known for his formula in queuing theory) in 1966, gives you the feeling that challenges for OR in Marketing haven't changed much. Little indicates, among other trends, that increased complexity of the models, the use of large amounts of data and on-line computation are important trends that stimulate marketing research in OR. Looking at today's challenges for OR in marketing they are more or less the same, although the time span for marketing decisions has decreased enormously, even to split second level. With the internet, blogosphere, twitter, a lot more data has become available than back in 1966 to study consumer behaviour. Also more variables are taken into account making the models more complex. Marc Teerlink of IBM will give us some insights in how IBM enables organisations to use all the available information and turn it into dollars. Many organisations keep track of our consumer behaviour nowadays. Using that information in a smart way can bring new insights and direct senior management in their marketing decisions. Wouter Egberink from KPN will describe to us how OR is used at KPN to analyse customer behaviour and how it is used to advice senior management. In the parallel sessions in the afternoon Paul Hessing from Adtrackxys will tell us about the models behind internet marketing, while Harald Hoogstrate from PointLogic will gives us some insights in fusing data from customer surveys in directing marketing initiatives across different media.