Dell Inc. will receive a Concept Award, while Robert G. Brown, founder and president of Materials Management Systems Inc., will receive a Practitioner Award during the 53rd annual Harry E. Salzberg Memorial Program, to be held April 2. The award program, administered by Syracuse University's Martin J. Whitman School of Management, recognizes individuals who have registered professional accomplishments of uncommon magnitude in the field of logistics, transportation and supply chain management, as well as corporations or individuals whose pioneering ideas or policies have reshaped their industries.
The event will be held in Schoepflin Auditorium; it is free and open to the public.
According to the Salzberg Award coordinator Gary Lapoint, an assistant professor of quantitative methods in the Whitman School, Dell's mass customization model has transformed American business practices and expectations in indelible ways, creating a supply chain unparalleled in efficiency and transparency and defining a new standard for customer service. Its model is based on five basic tenets: Take the most efficient path to the customer; have a single point of accountability; build to order; become a low-cost leader; and use standards-based technology.
During his 50-year career in operations consulting, research and teaching, Brown has pioneered statistical tools that revolutionized the theory and practice of inventory control, according to the awards committee. As a consultant to hundreds of corporations on six continents, he has applied these methods to real-world challenges, resulting in billions of dollars in savings.
Brown began his career working on the operations research challenges of industrial clients as a consultant and founded Materials Management Systems in 1970. He is the author of many texts in operations management, including "Statistical Forecasting for Inventory Control" (1959), "Smoothing, Forecasting and Predication of Discrete Time Series" (1963), "Management Decisions for Production Operations" (1971) and "Management of Materials" (1997).
The Harry E. Salzberg Memorial Program was established in 1949 under a grant made to SU by Murray M. Salzberg '37 to memorialize his father's distinguished career in transportation.
