New York City and Fashion Supply Chain Management

I recently spent a few days in New York City and stayed at our favorite hotel on the Upper West Side, The Excelsior, which is across from the Museum of Natural History. As appropriate to one of the themes of the 2011 World Science Festival, which took place in NYC, June 1-5, I basked in both Art and Science.

I had a chance to go to the Guggenheim, which will soon be celebrating its 40th anniversary, to see the Frick Collection, and the Cooper and Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design, which had a breath-taking exhibit on over one hundred years of Van Cleef and Arpels jewelry. Also, my family and I got to see several of our relatives and my daughter got together with a friend from her prep school (while strolling in Central Park they were recognized by another friend of theirs who was in town from Connecticut to see The Museum of Natural History). Of course, we also headed over to Broadway and Times Square to view the pedestrian plaza where I had been filmed back in freezing March for the PBS production American Revealed for a segment on Transportation and the Braess paradox and even Basketball!

NYC never fails to captivate and we walked for miles and enjoyed not only Central Park but also the hustle and bustle of NYC and the amazing sights, sounds, energy, people, fashion (high as well as fast) and live theater.

Speaking of fashion, I am delighted that the preface to the Fashion Supply Chain Management: Industry and Business Analysis book is now online. This book, in which we have the leading chapter, Fashion Supply Chain Management Through Cost and Time Minimization from a Network Perspective, is edited by Dr. T.-M. Choi, and will be released next month.

Above I have posted some photos that were taken this past week in NYC, which depict scenes that show the beauty and elegance of this great city. I must also commend the taxi drivers, whose navigation and driving skills are terrific (at least in mid-Manhattan) and we made it to Penn Station just in time to catch the Metro North train.

Top Models for Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management

Today is Earth Day, so I would be remiss if I were not to post about supply chains and the environment.

When I say "top models" I am speaking not of the three-dimensional kind that are featured in the media and ads and on the covers of glossy magazines (and you may be able to name your favorites either male or female), but, rather, I am referring to mathematical models, based on which we can make important decisions. Yes, some of my colleagues in operations research and the management sciences still hold on to their t-shirts with the logo "We Do It With Models."

Also, despite what today's The New York Times is reporting about declining sales of green consumer products (except in the case of "good" deals), sustainability matters.

Fast fashion and the apparel industry is global in nature -- of course, everyone wears clothes, and for those of us who live in New England, we wear different clothes, based on the season, and sometimes lots of layers of them.

Fashion and apparel supply chains are fascinating, and involve decision-making regarding global outsourcing versus in-house production and quick-response.

Also, today, we are living in a world where the competition is not among firms but among supply chains and, given the same price, what would a socially-responsible consumer do -- she would purchase the product that made less of a negative impact on the environment!

As for the models that we have been developing, they include supply chain network models for competition among different fashion brands with sustainability, also available from the publisher, the International Journal of Production Economics, as well as multicriteria decision-making supply chain network models that capture time versus cost tradeoffs, which will appear as the lead chapter in the forthcoming book: Fashion Supply Chain Management: Business and Industry Analysis.

Above is a photo of what I consider to be a very special gift, given to me by the participants in a workshop that I organized at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center on Lake Como in Italy, a fashion design mecca. The beautiful scarf with butterflies was made there locally and the silk was spun by silkworms! In fact, I find it too beautiful to wear and consider it art and a remembrance of a very special time.

And then there is Nancy Judd, an environmental educator and designer, who creates fashions out of recycled materials, including trash, some of which can then be put back in the compost pile!

Congrats to ISO Midwest -- The 2011 Edelman Prize Winner!

Yesterday, I gave a seminar at the Management Sciences Department at the University of Waterloo in Canada. My hosts were simply fabulous and I so much appreciate their attention to detail, from hiring a van shuttle to/from Pearson airport in Toronto for me, for the fabulous lunch at the Faculty Club, and the wonderfully scheduled meetings with faculty and with students. I even got a great night's sleep the night before at the Waterloo Inn. I especially thank Dr. Fatma Gzara for making my visit to Waterloo so pleasant.

In my seminar yesterday afternoon, "Supply Chain Networks: Challenges and Opportunities from Analysis and Design," I spoke on our work on supply chains from electric power generation and distribution ones, results for which were published in Naval Research Logistics in 2009 to our more recent work on critical needs supply chains. I also highlighted some of our research on fast fashion supply chains and work that we are doing on perishable supply chains in healthcare. I also brought into the discussions some of our recent results on the Braess paradox.

There are so many universities in the Toronto area and I heard that about one third of the population in Canada lives in this part of Ontario! Some students from Wilfrid Laurier University (we could see it from the seminar window) marched over to my talk (and it took them about 6 minutes).

Last night, at the Pearson airport, prior to my flight back from Toronto to Hartford/Springfield, I met a manager who had just arrived from Shanghai and works for a high tech company in Connecticut which, among its products, manufactures high tech equipment for the apparel and fashion industry. Our 18 seater Beech airplane provided each of the 8 passengers on board with both an aisle and window seat (the solitary steward was almost double-overed standing up in it and there was no drink service). We continued our conversation during the flight which had some turbulence but nothing compared to that in two of my favorite movies: "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles," and "Airplane."

Now, I hear, that on the same day that I was speaking about our research that modeled the New England fuel and electric power market, using ISO New England data, INFORMS announced that the 2011 Edelman Prize Winner is ISO Midwest! Coincidentally, while at Waterloo, I spoke with Professor J. David Fuller who told me about the book that he is writing with Gabriel and Hobbs and others on energy and he will be including a section on variational inequalities in it! Professor Bookbinder and I also had a chance to then discuss the future challenges of global supply chains (obviously, the triple disaster in Japan entered our conversation and also my seminar presentation).

Congratulations to ISO Midwest -- the link to the youtube posting of the award ceremony and the official INFORMS press release can be accessed here. In fact, all of this year's finalists deserve congratulations.

Just think, where would we be without electric power and reflect on the citizens of Japan, who, in addition to their already severely disrupted lives after the earthquake / tsunami / nuclear disaster, are now subjected to rolling power blackouts and even elevated radiation in the food, tap water, etc. Today, the nuclear disaster was elevated to a level 7, the highest level, as was Chernobyl.