About the Authors

Marshall Fisher is the UPS Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director of the Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management. His research, teaching, and consulting focus on retail and global supply chain management. He is a member of the Harvard Business School Visiting Committee and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the Production and Operations Management Society, and the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society. In 2004, his paper “The Lagrangian Relaxation Method for Solving Integer Programming Problems,” published in Management Science in 1981, was voted by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science as one of the ten most influential papers published in that journal’s fifty-year history.

Ananth Raman is the UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on supply chain management, retail operations, and the investor’s perspective on operations. In addition to his scholarly papers, he has authored over twenty case studies based on real-world operational issues and student notes, which are taught extensively in courses at Harvard and other business schools. He has created and taught numerous courses to MBA students and executives, and serves as an adviser to a number of CEOs.

Professors Fisher and Raman co-direct the Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing, a research group that involves academics from numerous universities and leading retailers worldwide, and are cofounders of 4R Systems, Inc., a software and consulting firm that manages inventories for large retailers.