HANOVER, MD, April 12, 2007 – Coca-Cola Enterprises has been named one of only five finalists in an international competition that singles out the best project by an organization.
The winner of the Franz Edelman competition will be announced at a special awards banquet during The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) Conference on O.R. Practice in Vancouver from April 29-May 1. http://meetings.informs.org/Practice07/
Every year, the Franz Edelman competition recognizes outstanding examples of Operations Research (O.R.)-based projects that have transformed companies, entire industries, and people’s lives. O.R. uses advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions and is a disciplined way by which management can improve organizational performance in a wide variety of situations, in nearly any type of organization in the public or private sector.
Past Franz Edelman winners have included Motorola, Merrill Lynch, Canadian Pacific Railway, and IBM.
Coca-Cola Enterprises’ submission is “Optimizing Distribution at Coca-Cola Enterprises.” The bottler and distributor of Coca-Cola products responded to the growth of its fleet, which increased from 13,000 vehicles in 1986 to approximately 54,000 today. With a vast system and demands to route in the most efficient way, Coca-Cola Enterprises applied operations research to improve the scheduling of its trucks.
Coca-Cola Enterprises achieved its goals by implementing a route optimization model, the result of cooperation between the company, the software maker ORTEC, and Tilburg University, a Dutch university. The impact includes annual cost savings of $45 million. The reduction in miles driven has also resulted in reduced consumption of fossil fuels and less pollution.
Since the introduction of the program, implementation has begun at other Coca-Cola bottling companies (including Coca-Cola HBC, which serves 25 mainly Eastern-European countries) and beer distributors (including Carlsberg, Heineken, and Inbev). At Inbev, the return on investment was realized within a single year.
The Edelman competition will take place throughout the day at the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver on Monday, April 30. The winner will be announced at a banquet in the Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton. The winner will be announced at the gala approximately 9:15 PM. A press release announcing the winner will be issued the next day, May 1.
The additional 2007 Franz Edelman finalists are:
- The U.S. Coast Guard, for “Maximizing Aircraft Availability by Managing Aircraft Maintenance Throughput at the U.S. Coast Guard Aircraft Repair and Supply Center”
- Hewlett-Packard, for “Procurement Risk Management at Hewlett-Packard Company”
- DaimlerChrysler and J.D. Power for “PIN Incentive Planning System: A Decision Support System for Planning Automobile Manufacturers' Pricing and Promotions”
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for “Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics”
Additional information about the Edelman Competition is online at http://www.scienceofbetter.org/Edelman.
About INFORMS
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is www.informs.org. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.
About Coca-Cola Enterprises
Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. the world's largest marketer, distributor, and producer of bottle and can liquid nonalcoholic refreshment. Coca-Cola Enterprises sells approximately 80 percent of The Coca-Cola Company's bottle and can volume in North America and is the sole licensed bottler for products of The Coca-Cola Company in Belgium, continental France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Monaco, and the Netherlands. Coca-Cola Enterprises represents 19 percent of The Coca-Cola Company's total global volume.
About ORTEC
Founded in 1981, ORTEC provides optimization-based decision support software and consulting services for fleet routing, vehicle and pallet loading, network planning, workforce scheduling and order generation. The company has over 800 customers worldwide and 550 employees located in North America and Europe.
###