Past Awards
The Walt Disney Company
The 2017 INFORMS Prize is awarded to The Walt Disney Company for presenting a world of opportunities for pioneering, impactful and innovative analytics. What sets analytics at Disney apart is the diversity of applications that could only be found by combining a variety of different industries. Analytics has found rich opportunities in the areas of consumer and guest experience, creative content generation, operational excellence and more. Even though Disney’s applications are diverse, the core operations research principles transcend across multiple lines of business. For instance, simulation is used to optimize attractions, textiles facilities and transportation systems. Forecasting applications are rich, from attraction wait times to guest experience, to box office receipts for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and to TV viewership of college football games. Stochastic process and queuing theory are used to optimize guest attraction experience, call center performance, and demand management across the enterprise product portfolios. Optimization is ubiquitous throughout the company. Examples include optimizing schedules for over 90,000 hourly cast members every day, optimal fleet sizing for transportation assets, maximizing sales efforts through channel optimization, optimizing the advertising sales process at Disney’s media networks, and the implementation of yield management techniques for The Lion King on Broadway. Analytic solutions at Disney regularly require a fusion of operations research, statistics, econometrics, machine learning, big data analytics, with implementations leveraging knowledge and advancement in computer science and other science disciplines.
The number of analytical professionals has grown nearly three-fold over the past decade to approximately 1,000 total employees with more than 30 executives leading the organizations. With such a prominent analytics culture, Disney is focused on giving back to the analytics community. One way of doing that is by sponsoring The Disney Data and Analytics Conference, an annual event for analytic professionals to share best practices, learn from industry leaders, celebrate successes and connect with each other. The Conference has grown to include a year-round initiative that promotes the evangelization of analytics – “Evangalytics” – through a speaker series, opportunities for continuing education, bi-monthly newsletters, and a new sponsorship program that encourages women in business programs at leading U.S. universities to pursue post-graduate studies and careers in management science.
Analytics plays a key role in not only creating innovation and value throughout The Walt Disney Company, but also provides a foundation for the company’s future strategic initiatives and decision making. From Disney Research providing the innovation and technology engine that drives many creative products to many teams enhancing the guest experience in Parks and Resorts, there is a large direct, measurable impact on business results. Storytelling has always been a core value at Disney. The use of analytics helps shape Disney’s future stories through informed decisions that improve overall business performance and will create magic for years to come.
The U.S. Air Force
The 2017 INFORMS Prize is awarded to the United States Air Force for consistently applying advanced analytics and operations research/management sciences for the past 75 years. Air Force leaders have relied on sound operations research counsel for their most important defense decisions from the uniformed service’s founding in the 1940s to the present. The Air Force’s history of utilizing analytics principles dates to 1942, when the Commanding General of the Army Air Force Henry “Hap” Arnold directed the establishment of an operations research unit in each of his major combat headquarters. Over the decades, Air Force analyses and research have been the driving force behind many advances, such as the simplex algorithm, which was developed by Air Force analyst Dr. George Dantzig.
While employing over 647,000 Total Force Airmen composed of Active Duty, Air National Guard, Reserves, and government civilians, the Air Force’s commitment to impactful, applied advanced analytics continues. Air Force leaders consistently depend on 539 military and 849 civilian operations research analysts serving in 300 organizations to produce strong analytics to make fiscally responsible decisions on a budget of $163.1 billion. Over the years, Air Force operations research analysts have been recognized for numerous prestigious awards, even though much of the work is classified and cannot be disclosed.
The Air Force also advances scientific research. The United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, originally known as the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group, was established in 1944. For more than 70 years, this board has enabled Air Force leadership to maintain a “vision into the future” of technology-enabled capabilities. In 1951, the Air Force founded the Office of Scientific Research—from 2006 through 2014 it awarded $298 million to operations research projects, yielding about 1,500 published journal articles.
Over the past seven-plus decades, operations research professionals have guided and shaped the Air Force from the Cold War to today’s dynamic and complex global operations. They provided timely, credible, and defendable analyses when and where they were needed. Air Force operations research analyses have been and continue to be essential to informing decisions in diverse areas such as logistics, infrastructure, manpower, operations, acquisition of new systems, and cost effectiveness. As former Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Mark Welsh put it, “From factories to flight lines and concepts to constellations, operations research underscores every step we take toward safeguarding our Airmen, our allies, and our assets.”