The seminar held at PHBS on the 17th of December 2014 introduced Professor Meng Li, who came to us from the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.His research focus is Data-Driven Decision Making, Supply Chain Management, and Behavioral Operations Management.
Professor Meng Li earned his PHD from the University of Texas at Dallas majoring in Management Science. Before that, he earned two Master Degrees from Oklahoma State University in Industrial Engineering and from Tianjin University in Computational Mathematics.
In this discussion, Professor Meng Li spoke about the importance of information to managing inventory. A lot of companies around the world, especially in retail, face information delay, which causes higher inventory losses and lower sales. Knowing of the vital role of inventory, Professor Meng Li saw a research gap and decided to investigate this subject, which is of upmost consequence for factory managers and retailers.
To solve this issue, a lot of experts turn to machinery and say that machines can do a better job than humans when it comes to inventory. Others suggest that companies should keep track of inventory by using a “Counting” method, which could turned out to be costly and time consuming.
With this research, Professor Meng Li’s proposes to obtain inventory management policies with incomplete information. The purpose is to show that there will always be mistakes in inventory management, but as long as these mistakes were limited to a small percentage.
The results of this research have shown that most inventory records or cash register information used differ from actual inventory because of a variety of factors including transaction errors, theft, spoilage, misplacement, unobserved lost demands, and information delays. The final recommendations were that companies have to control their losses, make their employees aware of waste and work on finding optimal production and ordering policies.
Professor Meng Li teaches ‘Management Decision Models.’ He has presented his research at numerous universities and conferences. He is also a reviewer for many journals, and an associate editor for Journal of Modeling in Management.
Written by Hicham Lefnaoui
