December 1998 INFORMS Prize Spotlights Secrets of Lucent's Success The INFORMS Prize, the highest honor given for an organization's body of work in operations research, was awarded to Lucent Technologies at the 1998 INFORMS Fall Meeting in Seattle. The award recognized the company's "pervasive and successful use of operations research throughout its business, at both the operational and the strategic levels of the corporate enterprise." "ÔMath makes good' is what this award tells the world," said Ernie Rodriguez, Bell Labs vice president of Advanced Technologies, whose organization led the effort to document and demonstrate operations research at Lucent. "The application of the fundamental math, analytic techniques and scientific management tools we know as operations research not only helps us better manage our operations, but also helps us deliver better products to the marketplace." Deeply ingrained in the company's R&D, management and manufacturing practices, operations research is now directly coupled to Lucent's strategic focus on the convergence of data and voice networking, the transformation of the network core to packet and optical technologies, and the emergence of advanced wireless and broadband access options. "Operations research is often so far behind the scenes of an enterprise as to be invisible," said Rodriguez. "Yet the results are reflected in highly visible ways — in large-scale operations and in financial results that capture the world's attention. What Lucent and its customers are engaged in is nothing less than creating the future of communications, and operations research is playing a critical role." One of the ways Lucent knows networks is through the mathematics of queueing theory, performance modeling and analysis, and simulation of system and network behavior under unpredictable mixes of data, voice and video traffic. To give just a few examples, Bell Labs scientists and engineers have employed such mathematical insights and techniques to create Internet Protocol (IP) and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) systems that can make future data networks as reliable as today's telecom networks; to boost the capacity of wireless systems through smarter power control; to improve restoration algorithms for optical networks; and to analyze the performance impact of Intelligent Network services and communications middleware. Operations research has enabled Lucent to design better products and to build them better. Robust design methods, based on advanced statistical techniques, have improved product reliability and reduced manufacturing costs. Another recent application of operations research helped several of Lucent's manufacturing facilities improve service to customers while decreasing inventory by millions of dollars. Lucent's Merrimack Valley, Atlanta and Oklahoma City Works implemented the same statistical inventory-management system for very different products — network multiplexers, fiber-optics apparatus, and switching and access products, respectively — yet achieved similar results. All three use the Inventory Requirements Planning System to analyze demand and supply variations over the products' lead time, to measure forecast error and supply performance, and to determine the optimal inventory "buffer" levels needed to meet objectives for customer service. Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 1998 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 1998 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.