Award-winning analytics to help online retailer improve revenue
Professor David Simchi-Levi, graduate student Kris Johnson (Operations Research) and Alex Lee SDM ’14 (Engineering & Management), along with online retailer Rue La La, received the 2014 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award on June 5 for a project expected to increase the company’s revenues. The analytics-based pricing-optimization application was developed through the Accenture and MIT Alliance in Business Analytics. This application shows “how analytics can change the way a company operates,” said David Simchi-Levi, who is also co-chair of the Accenture and MIT Alliance in Business Analytics. Starting with the goal of reducing inventory, “we ended up with a cutting-edge, demand-shaping application that has a tremendous impact on the retailer’s bottom line.” INFORMS is the world’s largest professional society for operations research, management science, and analytics. Read the MIT News story.