Operations Research Society of the Philippines

Operations Research Society of the Philippines
Address: Suite 14 A Cyber One, 11 Eastwood Avenue
Eastwood City, Cyberpark, Bagumbayan
Quezon City PHILIPPINES
Telefax: 439-9496 E-mail: secretariat@orsp.org.ph

ORSP Technical Forum Series

ORSP holds technical forums quarterly to foster learning of OR and its applications. These are open to members, student chapters, and anyone with an interest in OR. Past topics have included, among others, OR and supply chain management, energy, organizational management, sustainable development, environment, food supply, traffic issues.

Click on a title to read the forum highlights:

November 2010 Panel Discussion

April 2008 Forum
“OR Successes and Struggles in the Real World”

Entitled Operations Research in the Real World, the first 2008 Technical Forum was held last April 19 in cooperation with Ateneo de Manila University. On hand to welcome the participants was the chair of the Quantitative Methods and Information Technology at the John Gokongwei School of Management of the ADMU, Angelo Ramon Tanchoco. ORSP members, guests, and members from the seven student chapters filled the Escaler Hall of Science Education Complex to learn from the discussions of noted OR practitioners and academicians who gathered for the event.

Introduced by Board Director Malu de Guzman-U was first speaker Norman Lapid, Management Associate of the Operations and Technology Department at the Citi Markets and Banking group of Citibank, who talked on Testing the Implications of Product Line Expansion on a Conveyor Loading System using Simulation. He tackled the importance of considering how new product introductions must not only be analyzed from the marketing angle but also from the perspective of how it can utilize or complement existing logistical and operational systems. To do this, Lapid presented a dynamic animated simulation model with user-adjustable model parameters developed for a cement company. He showed how the use of a modeling software provided the logistics team with a practical and reusable OR tool for testing, viewing, and presenting to management a wide range of loading and product switching policies given their large set of uncertain and changing operational constraints.

With an interesting title, OR: The Secret Ingredient to Enterprise Decision Making (Why OR is the hidden key to making informed decisions with less risk and better outcomes), Jonathan Catane, Principal Consultant for Manufacturing of SAS Philippines shared how various enterprises all over the world select decision variables to achieve their objectives while obeying constraints through the use of OR. He cited the importance of sorting through all factors and information available in order to identify strategies that will produce success for business initiatives of the entire organization. He gave examples of how companies ensure that planned strategies optimize: resource allocation and management; production and inventory planning; product mix and blending; staffing allocations; distribution, routing, scheduling and traffic flow; supply chain management and optimization’ capital budgeting, asset allocation and portfolio selection; and identification of the best customer-offer-channel combinations given budgets and other constraints. He also introduced to the audience the OR tools available for doing all these through analytical business solutions from the SAS software.

Their talks were followed by a lively open forum that among others, suggested some extensions of the model presented by Lapid as well as queries directed at Catane about the implementation experiences of the SAS users of OR.

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Panel on OR Consulting:
Sharing Successes and Struggles

Those who wanted to hear more about the OR implementation experiences were not disappointed as the session that followed dealt exactly with this area. Entitled OR Consulting: Sharing Successes and Struggles, the panel was moderated by current International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) President, Elise del Rosario. In her words, the panel is composed of distinguished OR practitioners whose collective internal and external consulting experience in OR total one hundred years.
Angelo Ramon Tanchoco started off the panel by citing how soft systems methodologies can help structure and diagnose the problems that clients bring to the consultant. Echoed by all the succeeding speakers, availability of data for use was singled out as the major problem faced by the OR consultant working in the Philippines. He also touched on the task of every consultant to educate but not alienate the client who may not be familiar with OR.

Internal consulting experiences were shared by the next speaker, Rex Robielos, Section Manager of Operations Research Group at Analog Devices General Trias and a Faculty Member of the School of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at Mapua Institute of Technology. He shared how the OR Department at ADGT, despite being a little bit over a year, has earned a reputation in the company such that important projects are being sent to the OR group for validation. He cited having a breakthrough project in an environment with 800 machines, 3000 employees and 5000 skus to optimize helped a lot in achieving this stature. He credits this success to four key success factors: top management support, having the right analysts around, the availability of resources and data.

Next to speak was Agnes Perez, OR manager of what could be considered an OR institution in the Philippines. The history shared by the speaker of the 37-year old OR group within San Miguel Corporation was rich with lessons from which other internal OR can benefit. Among other aspects, Perez touched on the advantage of an internal OR consulting group and the importance of an organizational location of an OR group that:allows access to senior management-sponsored projects; enables a system view of issues; and enables critical-mass staffing levels. She mentioned threats to group survival that include: poor marketing of services, competition form other resources, and staff reduction pressures.

Other experiences of an internal OR group were shared by the current Operations Research Manager of KFC – Mr. Donut Philippines, Marlene Gutierrez. While emphasizing key ingredients for a successful OR applications to include executive level support availability of data and IT support, she also highlighted the importance of an articulate, confident and competent OR consultant. She related the success of a project that resulted in savings as well as a project that resulted in valuable lessons for use in succeeding projects.

Armed with his wealth of experience on external OR consulting, past ORSP President, Vicente Reventar III gave tips on harnessing the valuable free resource in the internet that is available for use by every OR consultant. Armed with his experience as SVP of Pag-ibig and President of SVI Technologies, Reventar successfully provided OR consulting services to companies without internal OR groups. His two main messages to the audience are ways to be more effective when presenting results to senior management and to utilize open-source software and OR optimization servers (ASP).

The Vice Chairperson of the Department of Industrial Engineering at De La Salle University-Manila, Bryan Gobaco then drew on his experience working with large-scale models to warn OR consultants about the pitfalls of non-linearities, a large number of integer variables, the need for enormous amounts of data, and the dangers of promising the client what cannot be delivered. He then concluded that one of the main factors that could lead to a sustained and consistent use of OR is when the models could be embedded into decision support systems that could be deployed for use in organizations.

This was in turn, dealt with in full by the next speaker Alexander Hipolito, qualified by more than 10 years experience in supply chain consulting and solution implementation using SAP APO, i2, as well as specialized Optimization technologies such as CPLEX and Xpress-MP. After explaining the capabilities of supply chain software with embedded OR solutions, he went into the lessons learned, opportunities to explore as well as threats to defend against. He suggests building end-user expertise in interpreting optimizer results as a key to success in this area.

It can be said that the speakers, who all happened to be past or present ORSP Board members, catered to the whole audience, as they addressed questions relevant to practitioners who may have faced similar challenges, enlightened academicians whose main interest is to make classroom lessons more relevant to actual practice, as well as encouraged (or maybe discouraged?) students who are contemplating on careers in OR consulting. It was therefore no wonder that people stayed on even as the discussion went past the scheduled end by two hours! This is the reason why instead of giving her talk, E. del Rosario summarized the proceedings and turned over the floor to ORSP President Alleli Domingo who gave out tokens for the speakers and bid the participants goodbye, at least for this forum.

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November 2007 Forum
OR in Organizational Management is Alive and Well!

Highlighting the important role of Operations Research in the three essential functions of organizations, the last ORSP forum for 2007 focused on the use of OR in marketing, finance and operations. The Operations Management Forum was held on Saturday, November 10, 2007, at the National Engineering Center Audio Visual Room in UP Diliman, Quezon City.

Drawing on his extensive experience with the banking sector, Vic Reventar talked about the use of OR in finance. A professor of the Department of Quantitative Management and Information Technology at John Gokongwei School of Management of ADMU, showed the current state of OR applications in the Philippine local banking and financial landscape. He discussed the evolution of mathematical modeling methods that have been used to model the portfolio allocation problem and the representation of the asset-liability models in both banking and insurance companies with the help of examples. He also presented the problems and challenges of making OR applications pervasive in this important segment of the Philippine economy.

Operations management use of OR was shown through a specific application at the KFC by Marlene Gutierrez, Central Planning Manager of KFC-Mister Donut Philippines and part-time lecturer in Industrial Engineering-OR department in the College of Engineering at the UP Diliman. She demonstrated the power of simulation in giving their company the ability to try out approaches and test ideas for improving the speed of their service, not just at the counter, but at the backroom. A pilot store was modeled, with layout taken into consideration. She showed how a simulation model was able to clarify some questions on operational procedures which resulted in the reduction of management requirement, the validation of process flow, the recognition of the need for re-layout of some areas at the backroom, and the revision of batch sizing based on lean or peak periods. The talk not only gave a very vivid picture of the processes in the kitchen but also got many in the audience thinking about dropping by KFC to test their speed of service and have a bite of their chicken.

Professor Purba Rao, a Fellow in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, who teaches Advanced Topics in Marketing Research (among others) at the Asian Institute of Management, talked about the widespread applications of predictive modeling in management, such as in identifying customer segments with the highest future sales potential, who will be the most profitable customers, and those who are likely to purchase, again and who would spend the most. She identified three approaches in predictive modeling, namely: heuristic approach, statistical approach and data mining. She used very colorful predictive modeling examples culled from her work both in the Philippines and in India.

It was a well-attended forum. The number of walk-in participants saw the organizers trying to fit in 20% more than the capacity of the Audi Visual Room The three speakers gave the audience an OR tour, as it were, from banking and finance, to food service and on to beauty salons.

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July 2007 Forum
Environmental Issues Discussed at Natural Resources Management Forum

In recognition of pressing environmental issues, ORSP selected Natural Resources Management as the theme of its Technical Forum held on Saturday, July 28, 2007 at the Audio-Visual room of the NEC at the UP Diliman campus. Conducted in cooperation with the National Engineering Center, it featured respected authorities from the government and the academic community.

Environmental Education and Information Division Chief of the Environmental Management Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and chair of the Sub-Committee on Information and Education of the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development Elenida del Rosario-Basug discussed government education efforts in her presentation entitled “The National Environmental Education Plan (NEEAP) for Sustainable Development.” She introduced the NEEAP vision for environmentally-literate and proactive citizenry imbued with a sense of responsibility to care, protect and enhance environmental quality. She discussed how this vision requires educating all Filipinos from their earliest years both at home and in school, and the accompanying effort in curriculum and educational resources development, conferences, community involvement, and social advocacy. Status of the efforts was also tackled.

Taking off from this discussion, the next speaker, ORSP President Alleli Domingo, related how OR education has responded to the environmental management challenge through several examples. She introduced “Earth-keeping Awareness thru Operations Research Models,” with an award-winning song which reminds us that we are all “earth-keepers” and as such, are accountable for the proper use and preservation of the natural resources that have been given to us. She then discussed the role of quantitative reasoning in enabling people to think broadly and across disciplines.

The usual applications of OR in the minimization of costs and maximization of profits must be expanded to evaluate economic gains against the standard of long-term sustainability. She presented a survey of mathematical models that take their cue from nature, notably, ant colonies and flights of sea gulls. She also shared teaching practices that stir consciousness of students as earth-keepers.

Dr. Diomedes Racelis’ presentation on“Simulation Modeling Applications in Reforestation in the Philippines” caught everyone’s attention with the projection that if deforestation continues at its current rate, old-growth forests will disappear in ten years. An Associate Dean and Associate Professor at the College of Forestry and Natural Resources in UP Los Baños and recipient of UPLB Outstanding Teacher Award for Physical and Mathematical Sciences as well as the UPLB College of Forestry Outstanding Teacher Award, he discussed how simulation has been, and may be used in modeling the numerous and oftentimes conflicting considerations (geographical, economic, political, etc.) in forestry. He went into the details of a simulation model that helps optimize reforestation efforts. He ended by citing the advantages and disadvantages of using simulation modeling, and identified the major contributions of these models in the reforestation efforts.

After the snack, the audience was all set for another informative presentation on soft systems methodology as used in “Platforms & Terraces: Bridging Participation and Geographic Information Systems in Watershed Management with the Ifugaos” for presentation by Dr. Rhodora Gonzalez, Chairperson of the Department of Geodetic Engineering, Director of the Training Center for Applied Geodesy and Photogrammetry at UP Diliman. Lightning struck, and it knocked out the power at the Auditorium. After some minutes of waiting, the organizers thought it optimal to re-schedule the presentation for the next forum. The speaker graciously accepted the organizers’ apologies with a promise to be at the next forum.

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