Marshall Fisher

Marshall Lee Fisher is a Franz Edelman Laureate and recipient of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize and George E. Kimball Medal. Fisher received all three of his degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing his PhD dissertation on an optimal solution of resource constrained network scheduling problems. Prior to pursuing operations research and the management sciences on the graduate level, he spent a year at IBM as a computer systems engineering. Fisher’s first postdoctoral position was at the University of Chicago where he taught as Assistant Professor of Management Science prior to joining the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1977, Fisher co-authored an article on the location of bank accounts to optimize float with George L. Nemhauser. This analytic study of exact and approximate algorithms, considered one of the most influential papers ever published in Operations Research, was jointly awarded that year’s Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best publication in operations research. The paper was recognized as the first major application of probabilistic analysis to a combinatorial optimization problem. Nemhauser and Fisher developed the necessary ideas for this analysis and applied them to a partitioning technique for solving the traveling salesman problem. The following year, 1978, the duo wrote an influential article on an analysis for maximizing submodular set functions with Laurence A. Wolsey.

Fisher’s work began to move away from combinatorial optimization and focused on supply chain management. In the early 1980s, Fisher was part of a partnership formed between Air Products and Chemicals, Inc, and the University of Pennsylvania. This team improved the distribution of the company’s industrial gases with an on-line computerized routing and scheduling optimizer that dealt with the inventory management of industrial gasses at customer locations. The project won the top prize of the 1983 Franz Edelman Award competition for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The following year, he co-authored an awarded winning paper with frequent collaborator and former PhD student Ramchandran Jaikumar on computing in transportation.

Fisher was named an inaugural Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences in 2002 and three years later was awarded the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship of the society. He received the George E. Kimball Medal for dedicated service to the professional OR/MS community. This dedication has included service as the thirty-third President of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), TIMS Council Member, Chairman of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) Publications Committee, and Chairman of the Editor-in-Chief Selection Committees for both Operations Research and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.

Education

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SB 1965
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SM 1969
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD 1970 (Mathematics Genealogy)

Andrés Catalán and Marshall L. Fisher (Draft), Assortment Allocation to Distribution Centers to Minimize Split Customer Orders.

Santiago Gallino, Antonio (Toni) MorenoGarcia, Marshall L. Fisher (Working), Does Inventory Influence Demand? Exploring Billboard and Scarcity Effects.

Marshall L. Fisher and Ramnath Vaidyanathan (Working), A Demand Estimation Procedure for Retail Assortment Optimization with Results from Implementations.

Marshall L. Fisher and Ananth Raman, The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics are Transforming Supply Chains and Improving Performance (2010)

Santiago Gallino, Richard Kumyew Lai, Marshall L. Fisher (Working), Does Inventory Have a Scarcity Effect? New Evidence Using Extreme Weather For Exogenous Variation.

Marshall L. Fisher (2009), Rocket Science Retailing: The 2006 Philip McCord Morse Lecture, Operations Research, Vol. 57, No. 3, MayJune 2009, pp. 527540.

Abstract: Retailing is a huge industry. In the United States, retail business represents about 40% of the economy and is the largest employer. Retail supply chain management is still more art than science, but this is changing rapidly as retailers begin to apply analytic models to the huge volume of data they are collecting on consumer purchases and preferences. This industrywide movement resembles the transformation of Wall Street that occurred in the 1970s when physicists and other "rocket scientists" applied their analytic skills to investment decisions. The Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER) (codirected by Ananth Raman, Harvard Business School, and myself) is a group of academics working with about 50 leading retailers to assess their progress towards rocket science retailing and to accelerate that progress through selected research projects. After some brief comments on the current state of industry practice in retail supply chain management, this paper will describe examples of COER research in four areas: assortment planning, pricing, inventory optimization, and store execution.

Gurhan Kok, Marshall L. Fisher, Ramnath Vaidyanathan (2008), Assortment Planning: Review of Literature and Industry Practice , Invited chapter to appear in Retail Supply Chain Management, Smith Kluwer Publishers..

Marshall L. Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan, Serguei Netessine (Working), Retail Store Execution: an Empirical Study.

Karl Ulrich, Marshall L. Fisher, Kamalini Ramdas (2003), Managing Variety for Assembled Products: Modeling Component Systems Sharing , Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 5 (2), pp. 142156.

Jerry (Yoram) Wind, Vijay Mahajan, Marshall L. Fisher, TechnologyDriven Demand: Implications for the Supply Chain (2001)

Past Courses

OIDD397 RETAIL SUPP CHAIN MGMT

OIDD673 GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN MGMT

Several forces, ranging from technology that has dramatically reduced the cost of communication, to political developments such as the opening up of China, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe, have created an avalanche of outsourcing and offshoring and lead to supply chains that stretch halfway around the world. This course will study the many questions that arise in the management of such global supply chains, including: Which design and production activities to do inhouse and which to outsource? Where to locate various activities around the world? How to forecast the many factors that influence these decisions, including inflation in cost factors such as labor and freight, and the likelihood of future government regulation or political instability? How to keep the supply chain flexible so as to adapt to change? How to manage a geographically disbursed supply chain, including what relationships to have with vendors to ensure low cost, high quality, flexibility, safety, humane labor practices and respect for sustainability of the environment? The course is highly interactive, using case discussions in most classes and senior supply chain executives in many sessions. Grades are based onethird each on class participation, indivudla writeups of the discussion questions for 3 of the class sessions, and a course paper.

OIDD697 RETAIL SUPP CHAIN MGMT

This course is highly recommended for students with an interest in pursuing careers in: (1) retailing and retail supply chains; (2) businesses like banking, consulting, information technology, that provides services to retail firms; (3) manufacturing companies (e.g. P&G) that sell their products through retail firms. Retailing is a huge industry that has consistently been an incubator for new business concepts. This course will examine how retailers understand their customers' preferences and respond with appropriate products through effective supply chain management. Supply chain management is vitally important for retailers and has been noted as the source of success for many retailers such as Walmart and Home Depot, and as an inhibitor of success for etailers as they struggle with delivery reliability. See M. L. Fisher, A. Raman and A. McClelland, "Rocket Science Retailing is Coming Are You Ready?," Harvard Business Review, July/August 2000 for related research.

• Institute for Operations Research and Management Science George E. Kimball Medal, in recognition of distinguished service to the profession of operations research and the management sciences, 2007
• Production and Operations Management Society Fellow Award, 2005
• Institute for Operations Research and Management Science Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award, given in honor of Philip McCord Morse, MIT Professor and one of the founders of the field of Operations Research, 2005
• The paper M. L. Fisher “The Lagrangian Relaxation Method for Solving Integer Programming Problems” published in Management Science in 1981 was voted by the membership of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science as one of the ten most influential papers published in Management Science during its 50 year history, 2004
• 13th Annual E. Leonard Arnoff Memorial Lecture on the Practice of Management Science, University of Cincinnati, 2004
• Listed by ISI Web of Science Highly Cited as one of the 250 most cited researchers in economics and management, 2003
• Institute for Operations Research and Management Science Fellow Award, 2002
• Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society Fellow Award, 2002
• Listed in Who’s Who in the World, 2000
• Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence, 1999
• Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence, 1998
• Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence, 1997
• Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence, 1996
• Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence, 1995
• Elected to National Academy of Engineering, 1994
• National Council of Physical Distribution Management E. Grosvenor Plowman award for the paper “Computers in Transportation: From Integration to Intelligence” (coauthored with R. Jaikumar), 1984
• Institute of Management Science Edelman Prize, awarded to the best implementation of management science in that year, for developing and implementing a very large optimization system to control deliveries of liquid oxygen and nitrogen, 1983
• Lanchester Prize awarded to the outstanding publication in the field of operations research in that year, for the paper “Location of Bank Accounts to Optimize Float: An Analytic study of Exact and Approximate Algorithms,” Management Science 23 (coauthored with G. Cornuejols and G. L. Nemhauser), 1977

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Topline Detox and Strategic, Small Shifts: Lessons from Successful Retailers, Knowledge @ Wharton 04/17/2017
• Can Trump – or Anyone – Bring Back American Manufacturing?, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/30/2016
• Want to Stop Retail Showrooming? Start Training Your Staff, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/01/2015
• As Developing Economies Grow, Global Value Chains Reach a Turning Point, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/21/2013
• As China Changes, So Do Global Supply Chains, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/22/2013
• Chinese Supply Chains Reach an ‘Inflection Point’ – and Multinationals Recast Strategies, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/17/2013
• Finding a Common Language for Disasterresistant Supply Chains, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/27/2013
• Big Gains Await Retailers, Consumer Goods Organizations in a Digitally Savvy, Analyticsdriven World, Knowledge @ Wharton 12/21/2012
• Estee Lauder’s New Skin Care Brand in China: The Potential for Highrisk, Highreward, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/16/2012
• Should Manufacturing Jobs Be ‘Reshored’ to the U.S.?, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/26/2012
• Turning the Retail ‘Showrooming Effect’ into a Valueadd, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/26/2012
• Want to Improve Customer Service? Treat Your Employees Better, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/14/2012
• As Internet Sales Grow, Retailers Go OmniChannel, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/25/2011
• Marshall Fisher on ‘The New Science of Retailing’, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/17/2011
• Why ‘Friday’ Just Won’t Go Away, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/24/2011
• Can Colombia’s Troubled Textile Industry Reinvent Itself?, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/09/2011
• Manufacturing in a Twospeed World, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/10/2011
• Winning in Two Worlds: Supply Chain Flexibility, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/26/2011
• Supplychain Management: Growing Global Complexity Drives Companies into the ‘Cloud’, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/12/2011
• A Seasonal Sales Shift: For Bargain Hunters, Retailers Make Every Day Feel like Christmas, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/18/2010
• Surviving Silly Bandz: Prolonging the Shelf Life of Fads, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/21/2010
• Flexing Its Muscle: Why Manufacturing Is Bouncing Back, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/20/2010
• Reading the Economic Tea Leaves — and Employment Outlook — to Find Signs of Recovery, Knowledge @ Wharton 12/09/2009
• Fit for the Holidays: Amazon Is Shaping Up and Shipping Out, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/11/2009
• On the Clock: Are Retail Sales People Getting a Raw Deal?, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/01/2008
• Procurement — Global Supply Chain Strategy, Knowledge @ Wharton 06/09/2008
• Out of Stock? It Might Be Your Employee Payroll — Not Your Supply Chain — That’s to Blame, Knowledge @ Wharton 04/04/2007
• Avoiding the Cost of Inefficiency: Coordination and Collaboration in Supply Chain Management, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/06/2006
• Supply Chain Enterprise Systems: The Silver Bullet?, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/06/2006
• Bring on Armani, Prada, and Other Highend Brands: Japanese Consumers Still Demand Quality, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/01/2006
• Christmas Creep: The Shopping Season Is Longer, but Is It Better?, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/01/2006
• Spreading Yourself Too Thin: The Atkins Diet and Other Fads, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/19/2005
• Delving into the Mystery of Customer Satisfaction: A Toyota for the Retail Market?, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/10/2005
• When Will the Apparel Quota System Finally Go Out of Style?, Knowledge @ Wharton 06/29/2005
• Boy Meets Girl: Gillette and P&G Hook up Their Brands, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/30/2005
• In the Tsunami’s Wake: How Best to Respond, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/28/2005
• Retailers Expect Strong Holiday Shopping, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/05/2003
• The Price is Right, or Is It? Determining the Impact of Price on Sales, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/05/2003
• Why Bigbox Retailers Often Fumble in Their Global Growth Strategies, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/26/2003
• With Billions of Bytes of Customer Data, How Can Retailers Be “Starved for Information”?, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/16/2000