For Practitioners Only: A Case Study in Selling an OR/MS Project to a Nameless Company

Modeling and computing are often minor parts of an OR/MS project. The authors' experiences on a current modeling project are cited to emphasize the importance of communicating with and selling ideas to management. The project cited consists of developing and obtaining analyses from linear programming models of a company's production facilities. The experiences reported deal with the completed first phase of the project, which was modeling one of the company's plants. A second plant is currently being modeled. The company's name and its industry are not specified, since company officials feel that the model results would be strategically important to its competitors. No technical details of the model are spelled out, although these will be presented elsewhere.