Sridhar Tayur

Education and career

Tayur attended Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, an elite school in the state of Telangana. He earned his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1986, and Ph.D. in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell in 1990.

He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1991 as an assistant professor in The Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) (today known as Tepper School of Business), received his tenure in 1996, and was promoted to full professor in 1998. He is currently Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Operations Management. Within Carnegie Mellon, he holds courtesy appointments at Heinz College and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also Professor of Cardiology (by courtesy) at the Gerald McGinnis Center of West Penn Allegheny Health System. Tayur has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

Tayur was President (2001–2002) of the MSOM Society, the largest society of INFORMS, and serves or has served on the editorial board of (among others) Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, IIE Transactions, Optimization and Engineering, and Productions and Operations Management.

Tayur founded SmartOps (in 2000) and OrganJet (in 2011), and has consulted various organizations, including Caterpillar, ConAgra Foods, Deere, Flight Options, General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel, Kellogg's, and Microsoft. Tayur has also served as a "consultant to the firm" of McKinsey & Company in the areas of lean manufacturing and supply chain management.

Research

Tayur's work covers — in collaboration with a wide range of researchers from several disciplines — various Operations Management fields, including Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing, and Healthcare. His papers have been published in (among others) Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Queueing Systems, IIE Transactions, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. Notable collaborators include other INFORMS Fellows such as Robin Roundy (his PhD thesis advisor), Jack Muckstadt, Paul Glasserman and Dimitris Bertsimas; faculty colleagues such as Alan Scheller-Wolf, R. Ravi, and Ravi Kannan; and PhD students such as Jay Swaminathan, Roman Kapuscinski and Pinar Keskinocak.

Novel Algorithmic Methods. Tayur is recognized for his Operations Research work in developing novel algorithms for models in stochastic inventory theory (using Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis), integer programming (using Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, Algebraic Geometry, and Gröbner Basis Theory) and chance constrained programs (using random walks and rapidly mixing Markov-chain theory).

Manufacturing Operations. Tayur has developed models for kanban controlled serial lines, for lead time quotation, and for scheduling of capacitated multi-product systems using methods from queueing theory, stochastic models (including chance constrained programs) competitive analysis of on-line algorithms, algebraic geometry and mixed-integer linear programming.

Supply Chain Management. Tayur's "Value of Information in Capacitated Supply Chains," published in Management Science in 1999, is among "the twenty most cited 'supply chain' papers from 1995–2006," and among the top 30 most cited Management Science articles. His co-edited book “Quantitative Models for Supply Chain Management” is among the most popular reference books on supply chain modeling, and his work on "vanilla box" and “models for supply chains in e-business” are among the most popular references on supply chain management. He has also studied supply chain management of NGOs, such as food banks.

His current work explores how to effectively combat the "dark side" of global supply chains such as child labor, including understanding the potential impacts of a proposed national version of California's Supply Chain Transparency Act. His work alludes to effective countermeasures to strategic counterfeiters including those who are able to infiltrate licit supply chains.

Healthcare Operations and Policy. At Allegheny General Hospital, Tayur has conducted clinical trials that have established the clinical benefits of genotype guided therapeutic dosing of warfarin therapy. Tayur's work with Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was featured in the movie Concussion, applies OM methods to improve Medical Examiner's Office. In the area of long-term care, Tayur has examined the consistency of staffing and proposed an "on-call pool" approach. With transplant surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital, Tayur has analyzed liver allocation rules to better balance equity and efficiency between HCC patients and non-HCC patients.

Beyond multiple listing through OrganJet, working on a more fundamental problem of scarcity of supply of organs, Tayur collaborates with New Jersey Sharing Network, part of United Network for Organ Sharing, to investigates behavioral economic approaches to increase consent rate from legal next-of-kin of deceased individuals,[1] which attracted the attention of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was featured in the 24th Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation Annual Meeting in September 2016. Tayur also supports finding other innovative methods to increase organ donation, and supports the need for clarification to be able to conduct further research.[2] Tayur has also engaged other researchers, transplant surgeons, policy bodies as well as students through serving on the organizing committee of the 2016 Johns Hopkins Symposium on Healthcare Operations, with a theme of "When Organ Transplantation meets Operations Research," and speaking on "Effective and Innovative Solutions to Increase Organ Donation" at Harvard Effective Altruist Chapter.

In addition to his applied work, Tayur has adopted a strategic queueing approach to investigate (1) physicians' diagnostic test-ordering behavior in outpatient settings, and (2) the effect of multi-listing---powered by affordable jet services (OrganJet)---on U.S. organ transplantation candidates' life expectancy and organ wastage.

New Business Models. Tayur's research has also analyzed new business models such as scheduling of fractional jets, online rental models, and dynamic scheduling of advertisements in video games.

Teaching

Tayur has won various undergraduate and MBA teaching awards, including George Leland Bach Excellence in Teaching Award. One of Tayur's teaching cases entitled “Managing Operations in the Time-Shared Jet Business" won the First Prize of INFORMS Teaching Case Award in 2000, and another, entitled "Patient Experience Improvement at UPMC Eye Center," won the Second Prize of the same award in 2012. Tayur has written about "Operations Management MBA Teaching in 21st Century Business Schools," in which he identifies five shared shortcomings between the “Harvard approach” (case study) and “Carnegie approach” (mathematical models), suggesting a way to build on the best of both approaches, and also recognizes that entrepreneurship (including social enterprises) and increased number of women MBAs as two important topics that need to be addressed more centrally in MBA education, with a goal being to achieve the "higher aims" of management education beyond creating just another generation of "hired hands."[3]

He has also taught in executive education programs for various companies, including McKinsey & Company, Cisco Systems, and Schibsted.

Recognitions

Tayur was named one of the four “Masters of Supply-Chain Efficiency” by the Fortune Magazine, and a “Most Popular Professor” by BusinessWeek. He has been ranked as one of the stellar operations management researchers.

In 2012, Tayur was elected as a fellow of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for his “research on inventories and supply chain management, and developing new methodologies, implementing solutions in manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, and creating a market for enterprise inventory optimization software.”

In 2017, Tayur was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM).

In February 2017, Tayur was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for "developing and commercializing innovative methods to optimize supply chain systems."

Awards

In the field of Healthcare Management, his co-authored paper "Imaging Room and Beyond: The Underlying Economics Behind Physicians’ Test-Ordering Behavior in Outpatient Services" was the First Place winner in the 2012 Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) College of Healthcare Operations Management’s Best Paper Competition. In 2015, he won the Pierskalla Award for Best Paper in Healthcare from INFORMS, for his co-authored paper, "OrganJet: Overcoming geographical disparities in access to deceased donor kidneys in the United States."

His work with John Deere—which reduced over $1B in Inventory in just four years—was a finalist for the Edelman Prize. His PhD students have won a number of awards, including the George Nicholson Prize in 1996 and the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award in 2011.

Tayur's work on integer programming using Gröbner basis was a finalist for the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize.

“Academic Capitalist”

Tayur has been a serial entrepreneur and an active promoter of monetizing Operations Research, and was the first to coin the term “academic capitalist”. He has also highlighted Academic Entrepreneurship in America. He is an investor and member of the advisory boards of CCG Inc. (2001–10) (a private equity firm devoted to applying lean manufacturing techniques at small manufacturing firms and creating new jobs), MitraBiotech, NeoTribe Ventures, Onera, VocaliD, and Zenrez. He is a member of the board of directors of Orchestro, a developer of software-as-a-service based analytics platform that was later acquired by E2open, and Transplant Interface. Tayur is also a charter member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), and has served as a mentor for TiE ScaleUp.

SmartOps

In 2000, Tayur founded the software company SmartOps Corporation (and won the First Prize in EnterPrize Case Competition that year), and served as its CEO until 2012. The company raised Series A funding within 45 days, became profitable in 2003, and experienced revenue growth every year since its inception.

Tayur has been recognized for his entrepreneurship of SmartOps Corporation by the Carnegie Science Center Award for Innovation in Information Technology, and has been the subject of University of Virginia Darden School of Business's MBA Teaching case “SmartOps Corporation: Forging Smart Alliances?”

Through SmartOps, Tayur also coined the phrase "fix the mix." Several SmartOps customers, including Cabot Corporation, Celestica, ConAgra, Dow Chemical Company, Johnson & Johnson, Kohler Company, Lubrizol, LSI Corporation, Medtronic, PPG Industries, Wyeth, have spoken about their successes with Enterprise Inventory Optimization (EIO).

SmartOps was in a revenue sharing contract agreement with SAP AG, until February 2013, when SAP AG announced that it would acquire SmartOps to "develop 'real-time supply chain' software solutions, leveraging the SAP HANA platform, which empowers customers to run their businesses in real time – to analyze, predict, react and adjust instantly." Leveraging this acquisition, SAP has offered an "SAP Integrated Business Planning for Inventory" solution, allowing its clients to "manage the increased supply chain risk due to economic uncertainty, escalating customer expectations, demand volatility, and supply variability they face."

OrganJet

In 2011, Tayur founded the social enterprise OrganJet Corporation that facilities multiple listing and provides on-demand private jet transportation solutions for patients to receive organ transplantation in a wider geographic range.

Since the founding of OrganJet, Tayur's "entrepreneurial approach to reform organ waiting list" has caught the attention of Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth, among other preeminent economists. In addition, OrganJet has been covered by AOL/MAKERS initiative and in media of regions suffering from geographic disparity in waiting times for organ transplants such as Boston, Denver, and Wisconsin.

On August 7, 2013, it was announced that Irena Bucci, a resident of Washington D.C. area, through the service provided by OrganJet, successfully received a kidney transplant in Pittsburgh.

On August 20, 2013, OrganJet released a free self-service App to help chronic kidney disease patients find a low wait kidney transplant center in the US.

In June 2014, OrganJet sponsored a “Transplants” campaign with Mediaplanet and USA Today aiming to increase the public's awareness of the importance of organ donation.

A 2014 The Atlantic article titled "A Private Jet Is Waiting to Take You to Your Kidney Transplant" detailed the motivation behind Tayur's founding OrganJet and the company's latest developments. In discussing geographic inequality in organ transplantation, a 2014 The New England Journal of Medicine article cites OrganJet as an example of mobilizing the recipients (instead of mobilizing the organs) that would face lesser "political resistance that has stood in the way of broader organ sharing to date." The American Journal of Transplantation, in its February 2015 issue of "The AJT Report," mentions Tayur and his work through OrganJet as one of "grassroots groups and organizations formed to improve the quality of life for transplant candidates, recipients, their families, and the families of organ and tissue donors." Tayur and OrganJet have also been profiled in Ars Technica, Forbes, and Vice News.

OrganJet has been featured in research seminars in leading universities, including Cornell University, Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, and University of Chicago. OrganJet has also been featured at Harvard Kennedy School's 2016 New World Social Enterprise Fellows Program, where Tayur showcased OrganJet as an operational example of John Rawls's Difference principle, as well as 2017 Leadership for System Change: Delivering Social Impact at Scale Program with 40 Schwab Fellows.

“Management mechanics”

In line with Herbert A. Simon's reflection that “executive centrifuges” are needed for a science of “judgment mechanics,” Tayur proposed the term "management mechanics," which is a methodical way to conduct quantitative-model-based "management consulting" that also allows for a systematic way to implement organizational change that is sustainable using enterprise information technology. A wide range of "what if" analysis allows senior executives to tackle practical problems in operations management (PPOM) in the spirit of Peter Drucker's views on Management Science.

Depending on the situation in which they arise, PPOMs can lie "inside the factory," "outside the factory," or in the "interfaces between the inside and the outside of the factory." PPOMs in product companies (across a variety of industries) include designing rapid response supply chains, optimizing product portfolios, implementing a postponement strategy, planning production with significant changeover times and costs, reducing net landed cost in procurement, optimize working capital needs to meet service levels, operate a global supply chain using S&OP process, quoting accurate lead times, and design a seasonal logistics strategy through a gain sharing contract. Management Mechanics helps executives make sound judgements on strategic decisions that may span multiple organizational silos in their firm, or even cross firm boundaries.

In 1999, Tayur coined the term "planned spontaneity" to describe firms' supply-side strategy to create and respond to consumer demands spontaneously. The term has now been used to describe a new wave of technology enterprises aiming to satisfy last-minute consumer demands.

Pioneering a contract hybrid (OrganJet and GuardianWings)

“Contract Hybrids,” as a new legal entity, was proposed by Bromberger as a method to obtain the best of “for-profit” and “not-for-profit” entities, and further explored by Battilana et al. In July 2012, OrganJet (for profit) and GuardianWings (not for profit) became the first social enterprise to have a “contract hybrid” where a for-profit entity is symbiotically integrated with a not-for-profit subsidiary sharing a common social mission of providing inclusive access to organ transplantation.

A 2013 Harvard Business School case entitled "OrganJet and GuardianWings" (by Julie Battilana and James Weber) covers the decision process behind the organizational structure of OrganJet and GuardianWings. The case has been used by University of Michigan Ross School of Business, among other business schools, in its course "The Corporation in Society," where Tayur was interviewed by the instructor Jim Walsh, and students were asked to write on "If you were Sridhar Tayur, how do you think about your aspirations to establish OrganJet and GuardianWings, change the current transplant system in America, honor your commitments to Carnegie-Mellon University, and live a full life?"

In an interview with The Guardian, Tayur said that the hybrid model was more efficient than a traditional pure for-profit or not-for-profit: "It would have been much easier for me to have said it's a not-for-profit or a for-profit and satisfy the skeptics. But the primary goal of my company is to help as many people as possible get transplants quicker."

Deep computing

Through SmartOps, Tayur has also explored massively parallel versions of enterprise inventory optimization (EIO) algorithms on IBM's Blue Gene. In 2005, as Blue Gene's first supply chain application, the IBM-SmartOps pilot solved industrial scale problems with over a million variables in 0.04 seconds on a "half rack" system with 512 processors.

Speeches

Tayur was a plenary speaker for 2007 INFORMS Conference, 2008 MSOM Conference, and 2015 POMS Annual Meeting. He served as the commencement speaker for South Park High School in 2008, and Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. Tayur was invited to speak at various major forums, including UCLA's Marschak Colloquium, and Harvard's Igniting Innovation Summit, both in 2012. His 2013 speech at Brigham Young University was entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Certain Mathematical Models in Practice," resembling Eugene Wigner's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. In his supply chain thought leader plenary at MSOM 2014, he discussed "Management Mechanics" in his talk "Virtuous Cycle: From Problem Identification to On-going Value Creation." In 2014, Tayur delivered a Bangs Lecture titled "OR/OM Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century" at Cornell University. He also delivered a Leadership Lecture at IIT-Madras on “Academic Capitalism in the 21st Century.”

Tayur has been invited to speak on organ transplantation at various high-profile forums, including 2016 Johns Hopkins Symposium on Healthcare Operations and 2016 Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation (AMAT) Annual Conference.

Tayur has been a guest speaker for undergraduate, MBA and MS courses at several universities including Harvard Business School, Cornell University (Engineering), MIT (both Sloan and Engineering Schools), University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. In August 2017, he delivered a lecture on "What is Business?" to the MBA Class of 2019 at Tepper School of Business. He was a speaker for TiE StartupCon. In addition to his speeches on research, entrepreneurship and applications, he has spoken and written about the importance and strategy of preparing business faculty for effective MBA teaching. Tayur has also participated in panels that discuss life and career success factors (including, but not limited to immigrants and/or minorities) such as at WGBH event celebrating Asian Heritage.

Personal life

Tayur was born in Madras (now Chennai) in India to a Kannada-speaking family. His father was in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Tayur is married to Gunjan Kedia, and they have two children, both boys. Tayur and Kedia supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

Philanthropy

Education. In April 2014, Carnegie Mellon University received a $1 Million gift from Tayur and his wife Gunjan Kedia, a Tepper alumna (MSIA ’94). This gift is intended for constructing the Tepper Quadrangle that will house the new Tepper School of Business building. In February 2016, Tayur launched a new Institute Chair at IIT Madras.

Media. Tayur's charitable foundation, RAGS Family Foundation, has supported documentaries, such as Journey to Normal that was featured by The Shriver Report, and profiles several women veterans including Christine Mau who became the first woman to fly an F-35 Fighter Jet after her return. The foundation also supports Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival, one of the largest Asian film festivals in the U.S., including providing the funding for the annual People's Choice Award. Through SmartOps in 2010 and RAGS Foundation in 2013, Tayur has supported "The American Revolution," a feature-length documentary film. He is a member of the Leadership Donor Group at the Brattle Film Foundation, and a member of the advisory board of TrueSpark, a non-profit seeking to engage at-risk middle school youth using motion pictures. He is also a Board of Overseers and Ralph Lowell Society member of WGBH, in which capacity he has helped bring organ donation topics to wide public awareness through new PBS-OZY collaboration late-night TV show, Point Taken.

Medical Research. Since 2009, Tayur has been funding neuroscience research in Dr. Beverly Davidson’s laboratory at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (previously at University of Iowa) that utilizes RNA interference to find therapy for rare genetic disorders like SCA2. He has also supported Massachusetts General Hospital's organ transplantation research through sponsoring its "2015 Transplant Golf Classic" event.

Tayur has served as a policy advisor to the Polaris Project to counter human trafficking. Tayur and his wife have also been long-time donors to Children International, Childreach International, CARE, Smile Train, and American Red Cross, and have supported microfinance through Kiva for several years. Through SmartOps, he sponsored the 12th Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard Business School, the MIT Sloan Annual Operations Simulation Competition (OpsSimCom) in 2010 and 2011, and Els for Autism 2011 Golf Challenge.

Publications

Tayur has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. According to Scopus, Tayur's 12 most widely cited papers have been (ordered chronologically):

Three of Tayur's recent journal articles are:

In addition, Tayur has co-edited a book and authored several book chapters: