Title: Lessons from a Lifetime as an OR Practitioner
Speaker: Dr. Narayan Venkatasubramanyan
Venue: IEOR Seminar Room
Date and time: 21 November 2024 (Thursday), 11 a.m. – 12 noon
Abstract: The practice of Operations Research calls for skills far beyond the technical toolkit that most graduates are equipped with when they emerge from the halls of academia. As a result, the journey of an OR practitioner can be fraught with potential pitfalls of a seemingly non-technical nature that can seriously compromise their technical efforts. In this talk, we will cover specific episodes from a long career, each handpicked to highlight a specific challenge. These anecdotes are intended to highlight the limitations in modeling, incomplete understanding of the domain, inability to appreciate the pressing concerns of the organization that the practitioner intends to serve, and the challenge posed by "quick-and-dirty" methods to more rigorous approaches.
Biography: Narayan Venkatasubramanyan has been a practitioner of Operations Research since the mid-80s. During a career spread across five decades, he has brought quantitative methods and rigorous thinking to problems of decision making in a wide variety of industries, particularly in the area of supply chain optimization. After a brief yet rewarding stint at a software company in Bombay, he went on to further studies in the United States to complete his training in the field. He has worked in the field of supply chain planning since the mid-90s, first as the leader a team of OR professionals to build some of the seminal solutions to master planning in a wide variety of industries worldwide (semiconductors, CPG, automotive, oil, etc.), then as an entrepreneur who co-founded a company that focused on streamlining patient flow in Dutch hospitals, and finally focusing on some of the biggest challenges in e-commerce at a company that pioneered online retail.
Narayan has a Ph.D. from the Department of Industrial Engineering where he wrote a thesis on restoring order in queuing systems. Prior to that, he has a PGDM from IIM-Ahmedabad, and a BTech from IIT-Bombay.