What’s Your StORy? John Milne Associate Professor, Clarkson University INFORMS member since 1985 What advice would you give to your younger self? Volunteer for activities that are important and interesting—even though they’re not your job. You’ll learn more, enjoy it, make contributions, and you’ll often be recognized for it. Also, working half-days on Saturdays will boost your productivity 20-30% (due to uninterrupted time) and you’ll still have plenty of weekend time for other matters (including relaxing/exercise). Tell us about your experiences at IBM. In 1984, I joined IBM’s semiconductor manufacturing business in East Fishkill, NY, to help design and develop a new software system for production control. Mostly, it was trying to understand what the users were doing manually and then designing software to automate it or—when their method was ill-defined—developing a method that seemed logical. It wasn’t until a decade later that I first used linear programming for planning IBM’s semiconductor division supply chain. By that time, the problems had grown more complex, and key members of the user community were comfortable using computers to make calculations that they could not perform personally on their hand-held calculators. In the years that followed, computing power and user comfort with it continued to increase. We saved IBM hundreds of millions of dollars by re-engineering the semiconductor supply chain planning and decision-making process. You have more than 40 U.S. patents—tell us your favorite! Material requirements planning (MRP) systems create plans that can be infeasible indicating actions that should have been done in the past. Though infeasibilities are undesirable in most contexts, in the context of a site MRP run, the site’s delivery commitments have already been made so the infeasibilities indicate where expediting is required. On the other hand, for a new IBM technology (with double-speed sorted product), linear programming (LP) was more appropriate for wisely allocating assets. I spent weeks trying to figure out how to make MRP smarter or to get an LP to indicate the expediting needs. Neither approach worked. Pressure for me to deliver was growing along with my frustrations. Finally, it occurred to me how to blend both LP and MRP technologies. This led to my first and favorite patent (U.S. Patent 5,943,484).
More questions for John? Ask him in the Open Forum on INFORMS Connect!
http://connect.informs.org