Sridhar R. Tayur is an American business professor, entrepreneur, and management thinker. He is university professor of operations management and Ford Distinguished Research Chair at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and the founder of SmartOps Corporation and OrganJet Corporation.
Tayur is known as an "academic capitalist," recognized for his contribution to Inventory Theory, Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing, Operations Strategy, Healthcare Management, and Quantum Computing. He describes his own work as "research, industrial implementation, software entrepreneurship, investing in start-ups and turnarounds, and creating a social enterprise" that lies "in the intersection of math, money, and morals." Tayur's work "has earned him a reputation as someone uniquely talented in identifying, and then solving, novel and timely problems confronting society," according to a 2014 Productions and Operations Management article honoring him.
Education and career Tayur attended Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, an elite school in the state of Telangana. He earned his B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1986Chennai36: Do whatever you like to do, but do something: A talk with Professor Sridhar Tayur | Chennai36, accessdate: May 14, 2016 and Ph.D. in operations research and industrial engineering from Cornell in 1990.
He joined Carnegie Mellon in 1991 as an assistant professor in The Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) (today known as Tepper School of Business), obtained tenure in 1996, and was promoted to full professor in 1998. In 2019, he was appointed to university professor, the highest designation a faculty member can receive at Carnegie Mellon. He holds Ford Distinguished Research Chair in Operations Management. Within Carnegie Mellon, he holds courtesy appointments in the Heinz College and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has held a courtesy appointment as professor of cardiology (2009–2011) at the Gerald McGinnis Center of West Penn Allegheny Health System. Tayur has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.
Tayur was president (2001–2002) of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM),MSOM Business Meeting Minutes, INFORMS Fall Conference, November 5, 2001 (Miami) one of the largest societies of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has served on the editorial boards of Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, IIE Transactions, Optimization and Engineering, and Productions and Operations Management, among others, and he is a department editor at Management Science, for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department.
Tayur founded SmartOps (in 2000) and OrganJet (in 2011), and has consulted for various organizations, including Caterpillar, ConAgra Foods, Deere, Flight Options, General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel, Kellogg's, and Microsoft. Tayur has also served as a "consultant to the firm" for McKinsey & Company in the areas of lean manufacturing and supply chain management.
Academic work
Research Tayur's work covers various operations management fields, including supply chain management, lean manufacturing, and healthcare. His papers have been published in Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Queueing Systems, IIE Transactions, and Production and Operations Management, among others. Notable collaborators include INFORMS Fellows such as Dimitris Bertsimas, Paul Glasserman, Jack Muckstadt, Georgia Perakis, and Robin Roundy (his Ph.D. thesis advisor); faculty colleagues Alan Scheller-Wolf, R. Ravi (INFORMS Fellow), and Ravindran Kannan; and Ph.D. students Srinagesh Gavirneni, Roman Kapuscinski, Pınar Keskinocak (INFORMS Fellow), and Jay Swaminathan (INFORMS Fellow). He is recognized for his operations research work in developing novel algorithms for models in stochastic inventory theory (using Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis).
Manufacturing, Retail and Supply Chain. Tayur developed Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) for stochastic inventory models, with a wide number of applications, including managing product variety using vanilla boxes, designing rapid-response supply chains, and omni-channel retailing. His 2021 National Science Foundation Distinguished Lecture, jointly sponsored by the Directorates of Engineering (ENG), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS), summarized his work on responsive and resilient supply chains using novel quantum and classical algorithms. In addition, he has examined the "dark side" of global supply chains, including counterfeiting and child labour.
Healthcare Analytics, Operations, and Policy. At Allegheny General Hospital, Tayur has conducted clinical trials that have established the clinical benefits of genotype guided therapeutic dosing of warfarin therapy. Tayur's work with Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was featured in the movie Concussion, applies OM methods to improve Medical Examiner Offices. In the area of long-term care, Tayur has examined ways to improve the consistency of staffing and proposed an "on-call pool" approach.
To address the fundamental problem of scarcity of supply of organs, Tayur has collaborated with the New Jersey Sharing Network and Nevada Donor Network, among other organ procurement organizations (OPOs), to investigate behavioral approaches that will increase the consent rate from legal next of kin (NOK) of deceased individuals through video intervention. This work attracted the attention of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was featured at the 24th Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation Annual Meeting in 2016. He has studied various aspects of split liver transplantation, including ethics, learning, and decisions support to determine optimal splitting policy, in collaboration with University of California, San Francisco transplant surgeons. His research on geographic disparity, gender inequity and video nudge were discussed at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on "A Fairer and More Equitable, Cost-Effective, and Transparent System of Donor Organ Procurement, Allocation, and Distribution."
Tayur supports finding other innovative methods to increase organ donation and supports the need for clarification to be able to conduct further research. Tayur has engaged other researchers, transplant surgeons, and policy bodies, as well as students, by serving on the organizing committee of the 2016 Johns Hopkins Symposium on Healthcare Operations, with a theme of "When Organ Transplantation meets Operations Research," and by speaking on "Effective and Innovative Solutions to Increase Organ Donation" at the Harvard Effective Altruist Chapter.
Tayur has studied personalized treatment for opioid use disorder, specifically, the efficacy of using wearables to prevent relapse.
In collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Tayur developed machine learning algorithms to predict hospital re-admissions due to sickle-cell disease.
In addition to his applied work, Tayur has adopted a strategic queueing approach to investigate (1) physicians' diagnostic test-ordering behavior in outpatient settings and (2) the effect of multi-listing—powered by affordable jet services (OrganJet)—on U.S. organ transplantation candidates' life expectancy and organ wastage. Tayur has also analyzed combinatorial models (using quantum- and quantum-inspired algorithms) and conducted topological data analysis (using algebraic topology) to study cancer genomics, using data on acute myeloid leukemia and Glioblastoma Multiforme from The Cancer Genome Atlas.
Tayur has explored improved data-driven methods towards making Liquid Biopsy practical.
New Business Models. Tayur's research has analyzed new business models such as scheduling of fractional jets, online rental models, online to offline (O2O) platforms, dynamic scheduling of advertisements in video games, and an entrepreneurial approach to the widespread adoption of multiple listing for organ transplantation.
Books
Tayur's co-edited volume, Quantitative Models for Supply Chain Management (Springer, 1999), is among the most popular reference books on supply chain modeling. Another, Handbook of Healthcare Analytics: Theoretical Minimum for Conducting 21st Century Research on Healthcare Operations (John Wiley & Sons, 2018), covers a wide scope of contemporary topics and provides timely access to modern analytical tools; the handbook is an "important volume" that "represents some of the brightest minds in analytics research, as well as physicians and senior healthcare executives."
Teaching Tayur has won various undergraduate and MBA teaching awards, including the George Leland Bach Excellence in Teaching Award. One of Tayur's teaching cases, entitled “Managing Operations in the Time-Shared Jet Business," won First Prize for the INFORMS Teaching Case Award in 2000, and another, "Patient Experience Improvement at UPMC Eye Center," won Second Prize for the same award in 2012. In his chapter on "Operations Management MBA Teaching in 21st Century Business Schools," Tayur identifies five shared shortcomings between the “Harvard approach” (case study) and “Carnegie approach” (mathematical models), suggesting a way to build on the best of both. He also notes entrepreneurship (including social enterprises) and the increased number of female MBAs as two important topics that need to be addressed more centrally in MBA education, with a goal of achieving the "higher aims" of management education beyond creating just another generation of "hired hands."
In collaboration with USRA/NASA and Amazon, and with NSF support, he developed a new course focused on Quantum Integer Programming (QuIP) in 2020, and expanded it to include Quantum Machine Learning (QuML) in 2021.
Tayur has also taught in executive education programs for various companies, including McKinsey & Company, Cisco Systems, and Schibsted.
Recognitions Tayur was named one of the four “Masters of Supply-Chain Efficiency” by Fortune Magazine, and a “Most Popular Professor” by BusinessWeek. He has been ranked as one of the stellar operations management researchers.
In 2012, Tayur was elected as a fellow of INFORMS for his lifetime achievements in “research on inventories and supply chain management, and developing new methodologies, implementing software in manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, and creating a market for enterprise inventory optimization software.” The importance of inventory control to economic productivity has been widely recognized, including by the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, who states that, "The big productivity gains of the period from 1995 to 2005 came largely in things like inventory control" (See "The Big Meh", by Paul Krugman).
In 2017, Tayur was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of MSOM. In the same year, he was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for "developing and commercializing innovative methods to optimize supply chain systems."
Awards