Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc. maintains, manufactures, and distributes flight manuals containing safety information for over 300,000 pilots and 400 airlines worldwide. Its service deteriorated when a growing line of over 100,000 aviation charts overwhelmed its production system. We developed optimization-based decision support tools that improved production planning. Concurrently, we developed a method for evaluating investments in production technology. Our work reduced …
Jeppesen Uses a Dynamic-Programming-Based DSS to Manage Inventory
We developed a system for managing inventory at Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc., a major provider of aviation-information products. The system determines order quantities for charts used in flight manuals. These charts contain essential safety information that changes frequently, making standard methods for inventory management ineffective. We formulated the problem as a dynamic programming model and developed a simple heuristic-solution procedure for …
ASP, The Art and Science of Practice: From Edelman Award to INFORMS Prize—Jeppesen’s 15-Year Journey Toward Analytics Excellence and Lessons Learned Along the Way
For nearly 80 years, Jeppesen has helped people safely reach their destinations by providing aviation professionals worldwide with navigational information, flight-planning services, and operations solutions. About 20 years ago, Jeppesen—like many companies—began to struggle with the transformation from the Triassic age of cumbersome machinery and analog pencil-on-paper decision making to electronic media and charting in the fast-moving digital age. Many …