EDS OR NewsletterVolume 1, Issue 2 August 2002

I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E

1 Profile: John Lucas

1 PLANETS: An EDS Innovation and Proprietary Product

2 Did You Know?

3 On the Lighter Side

5 OR Tools in Use at EDS?

5 Cartoon: Geek Graffiti

Newsletter 1

Profile: John LucasConsulting Principal, Enterprise Planning Optimization

John Lucas has been actively involved with operations

research for over thirty years, pioneering "strategic and

tactical supply chain and value chain planning." He has

won several professional acknowledgements and

awards, and has published visionary articles on

advanced planning systems. He is currently with EDS

Solutions Consulting in Troy, Michigan.

PLANETS: An EDS Innovation and Proprietary ProductI bet you didn't know that EDS created and owns a powerful

decision support system credited with more than $2 billion in

cost savings for General Motors!

Yep. I kid you not. The PLANETS system was invented,

designed, developed and enhanced over the course of the

last three decades to address strategic and tactical questions

initially posed by General Motors. Below I summarize and

quote liberally from the article PLANETS: A Modeling System

for Business Planning, by Robert Breitman and John Lucas,

originally published in Interfaces, Vol. 17, Issue 1, Jan-Feb,

1987. This special issue of Interfaces highlighted the1986

Edelman Award Finalists. As I described in the last issue of

this Newsletter, the Edelman Prize is considered the "Super

Bowl of OR," and to be named a finalist is one of the highest

honors an OR professional can receive.

One final note. PLANETS has been improved and

enhanced significantly over the fifteen years since this article

was published. PLANETS is applicable and targeted to

nearly all clients in all industries!

EDS can point with pride to having two (see last month's

Profile) Edelman Finalist award teams in its

organization.

The PLANETS decision support system was definitely

ahead of it's time when work on it began in 1973. But,

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Newsletter 2

The "father of PLANETS"John’s 34 year career spans success as an engineer, technology innovator, product planner, and manager of consulting activities. Mr. Lucas has made over 100 visits to global businesses in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific reengineering and optimizing enterprise value chains, leading business transformation activity, and developing and integrating business and IT plans.

John’s GM career began in 1969 as a process engineer at the Delco Moraine Division in Dayton, Ohio. In 1972, after obtaining his masters degree in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton, John was promoted to the corporate operations research group at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. Thus began John's three decades of interest and work in applying operations research to strategic problems.

John can be justifiably called "the father of PLANETS, the world’s first intelligent mathematical programming system and one of the first business applications of expert systems; applying the PLANETS technology, he pioneered the first successful global applications of supply chain and value chain optimization way back in 1974! Most notably, John led the teams who applied PLANETS on global enterprise optimization studies, achieving over $2 billion in documented cost savings for General Motors and others! (PLANETS, is the subject of the article on page 1.) In 1979 John was promoted to Senior Planner and recruited to join the prestigious GM Worldwide Planning Group to form and manage a new corporate planning support activity tasked with designing, developing, integrating and deploying capacity planning methods and decision support systems for GM worldwide.

John was not content to rest on these considerable laurels, however. He is also the "intrapreneurial spirit" responsible for the 1983 formation of GM's Motors Consulting Center (MC2), a revolutionary OR/MS technology transfer / consulting business enterprise formed and launched from former GM staff functions. This entailed seeking and obtaining executive support from John F. (Jack) Smith (then the GM Chairman) and the GM Executive Committee, combining three staff organizations into a profit center. Under GM guidance, the MC2 was successful and grew from eleven employees to over two hundred in less than two years, becoming the largest OR/MS consultancy of its day. The MC2 profit center was one of the first examples in business of redeploying former staff activities into an actual for-profit business enterprise (the other notable, and subsequently more successful, OR/MS venture being Tom Cook’s AMR/ Sabre Decision Technologies group, launched a year after MC2). In 1985, Motors Consulting Center transitioned into EDS as the Decision Technologies sales support activity following the purchase of EDS by GM. Since 1985, the remnants of this activity have become the nucleus of many EDS consulting activities

It was during this time (1986) that John and PLANETS, were nominated as finalist for the prestigious Edelman

Award from The Institute of the Management Sciences and The Operations Research Society of America, the predecessors to INFORMS.

Since 1993, EDS’ Enterprise Planning Optimization Service Offering has been leveraged with minimal resources. Currently John and Michael McClelland (heir to PLANETS leadership and a brilliant modeling and business consultant) comprise the consulting activity, succeeding in very large part primarily through the leveraging of PLANETS and other quantifiable methods.

John has been a member INFORMS, since 1985. He has represented EDS on the INFORMS Round Table since 1990. (See last month's Newsletter for an article about the INFORMS Round Table.) He also currently serves on the INFORMS Strategic Planning Committee and other sub-committees. John is currently up for election as a candidate for the 2003-2004 INFORMS Board of Directors, as Vice President of IT.

His professional awards include:• 1999: University of Dayton School of Engineering

Alumni Award of Excellence• 1999: INFORMS Prize nomination• 1986: TIMS / ORSA Edelman Finalist Award• 1979: GM Award of Excellence

John holds a Master of Science in Engineering

Management and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial

Engineering, both from the University of Dayton.

John's personal interests include restoring 1960's "muscle

cars" (a 1966 Corvette coupe and a 1969 Buick Skylark

convertible!!), SCUBA diving, shell collecting and traveling.

He and Barbara, his wife of 34 years, are actively involved

in the Big Brothers / Big Sisters program in Pontiac,

Michigan.

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Did You Know?Business Week recently included both Operations Research and Management Science in their list of the twelve most influential journals in order to rank research output of business schools? (See Business Week, October 2, 2000 issue.)

Newsletter 3

IN F O RMS N E W S & E V E N T S The cover story of the latest issue of ORMS Today is the

sixth biennial survey of decision analysis software. Survey

results include information for twenty-nine packages

provided by nineteen vendors. The author points out:

"Over the years, these surveys have been published as the

market for decision-supporting software has continued to

expand, as has the variety of modeling techniques that are

being identified as decision analytic by software vendors. In

fact, many of the software packages identified in this survey

would be barely recognizable as decision software to many

'old school' decision analysts. The emerging tools employ

optimization, simulation, and artificial intelligence techniques

that blur the historical distinction between decision analysis

and other analysis disciplines… the creative combination of

techniques complemented by the extremely powerful

computing visualization capability that is available potentially

provides very robust tools to a broader community of

analysts."

You might find this article to be a useful reference when

searching for or evaluating decision analysis software.

Check it out at www.lionhrtpub.com along with the other

software surveys and additional interesting articles in the

latest issue and back issues of ORMS Today.

C A L E N D A R O F I N F O RMS E V E N T S

2002 INFORMS ANNUAL MEETING

PLACE: SAN JOSE, CA, MCENERY CONVENTION CENTER

TIME: NOVEMBER 17-20, 2002

The theme of this year's conference is The Silicon Valley

Challenge: Management, Innovation, Technology,

Entrepreneurship, Creativity.

2003 INFORMS ANNUAL MEETING

PLACE: ATLANTA, GA, WESTIN PEACHTREE PLAZA

TIME: OCTOBER 19-22, 2003

See www.informs.org/conf for additional information.

On The Lighter Side- OR is made up of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent

proofs, and 50 percent imagination.- According to recent surveys, 51% of the people are

in the majority.- Five out of four people have problems with fractions

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Newsletter 4

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SALESSTRATEGY

ENGINEERINGSTRATEGY

MANUFACTURINGSTRATEGY

HOW MANY TOMAKE /

PURCHASE?

WHERE TOMAKE/

PURCHASE?

ALLIANCE?

SHOULD IT BEMADE?

HOW TODESIGN?

WHAT TOMARKET?

WHERE TODESIGN?

HOW TO DISTRIBUTE?

HOW TOPRICE?

WHICHMARKETS

TO SATISFY& WHEN &

HOW?

WHEN TOMAKE /

PURCHASE?

WHETHER TOMAKE OR BUY?

WHEN TO ENTER/ LEAVE

MARKET?WHEN TODESIGN?

HOW TOCAPITILIZE?

MARKETING

PRODUCTENGINEERING

R & DFINANCE

MANUFACTURING

MATERIALSMANAGEMENT

SALES

PROCESS /MFG.

ENGINEERING

WHAT TOMAKE?

WHICHDESIGN?

HOW TO MANAGERESOURCES?

MARKETINGSTRATEGY

PURCHASINGSTRATEGY

LOGISTICSSTRATEGY

FINANCIALSTRATEGY

Scope of EDS

Enterprise PlanningOptimizationCapability &Opportunity

@ 2001 EDS

Newsletter 5

OR Tools in Use At EDS?

Dr. Hossam Zaki of our Engineering & Logistics group of EDS Federal proposed what I think is an excellent idea.

Wouldn't it be useful for all of us if we collected and disseminated information about the OR tools we are using

throughout EDS?

So, while you're thinking about it, drop me a quick e-mail to let me know what OR tools you and/or your group are

using today: optimization packages, modeling software, statistics and forecasting, simulation, decision analysis, …

you get the idea.

We intend to put together a more structured "Tools Inventory Survey" soon, hopefully web-based. Stay tuned.

Hossam's idea was prompted by recent negotiations with ILOG about obtaining preferred pricing for their some of

their products (CPLEX, Solver, Scheduler, OPL and J Rules). He is still particularly interested in learning about

others who are currently using ILOG products. If you are licensing any of ILOG's products and/or have any

agreements in place with ILOG please let us know ASAP!

(vernon.francis-eds@eds.com, hossam.zaki@eds.com)

Ed. Note: I again apologize for the large file size of this Newsletter. For some strange reason, when I insert John's picture on page 1, the file size triples from approximately 500KB to over 800MB, even though the picture has been compressed to only 79KB!! Experiments with a new, blank Word document do not exhibit this behavior. Hopefully, I get this sorted out before the next edition. In the mean time, sorry for inconvenience. Until next month… Vern

Newsletter 6