Sridhar Tayur

Sridhar R. Tayur is an American management thinker widely known for his work in the field of Operations Management, in particular on Supply Chain Management, Lean Manufacturing, and most recently, Healthcare Management. He is currently Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Operations Management at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. He was named one of the four “Masters of Supply-Chain Efficiency” by the Fortune Magazine, and a “Most Popular Professor” by BusinessWeek. He is the founder of SmartOps Corporation  and OrganJet Corporation  , and served as the CEO of SmartOps from 2000 to 2011. He was President (2001-2002) of the MSOM Society, the largest society of INFORMS. He was invited to be plenary speaker for 2007 INFORMS Conference and 2008 MSOM Conference, commencement speaker for Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, and speaker for UCLA's Marschak Colloquium in 2012. He serves or has served on the editorial board of multiple top academic journals, including Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Productions and Operations Management.

Career
Tayur was born in India and graduated from IIT Madras in 1986 with his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering, and earned his 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), received his tenure in 1996, and was promoted to Full Professor in 1998. He is currently Ford Distinguished Research Chair and Professor of Operations Management. Tayur is also Professor of Cardiology (by courtesy) at West Penn Allegheny Health System.

Work
Tayur's work covers a wide span of Operations Management topics, including Healthcare, Inventory Theory, Supply Chain Management, and Lean Manufacturing. Many of his papers, mostly published in the flagship Operations Management journals like Operations Research and Management Science, have been extensively cited and won many research awards. For example, his "Value of Information in Capacitated Supply Chains," published in Management Science in 1999, has been one of the most widely cited papers in the field of Supply Chain Management. His book “Quantitative Models for Supply Chain Management” has been one of the most referred textbooks on supply chain modeling. One of his most recent papers on Healthcare Management, entitled "Imaging Room and Beyond: The Underlying Economics Behind Physicians’ Test-Ordering Behavior in Outpatient Services," was the First Place winner in CHOM’s Healthcare best paper Competition during POMS Annual Conference, Chicago, 2012. His PhD students have won a number of distinguished awards, including the George Nicholson Prize in 1996 and the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award in 2011.

Consultation
Tayur has provided supply chain solutions for many organizations, including Caterpillar, Deere, General Electric, McKinsey & Company, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. His work has been covered by business media, including the Fortune Magazine. He also served on the advisory board of CCG Inc. (2001-10), a private equity firm devoted to applying lean manufacturing techniques at small manufacturing firms and creating new jobs.

“Academic Capitalist”
Tayur has been an active promoter of monetizing Operations Research, and was the first to coin the term “academic capitalist”. In 2000, Tayur founded the software company SmartOps Corporation and served as its CEO until 2012 while continuing to teach and do research at Carnegie Mellon. In 2011, he founded the OrganJet Corporation that provides on-demand private jet transportation solutions for patients to receive organ transplantation in a wider geographic range. Tayur has been also been recognized for his entrepreneurship of SmartOps Corporation by the Carnegie Science Center Award for Innovation in Information Technology, and has been the subject of University of Virginia Darden School of Business's MBA Teaching case “SmartOps Corporation: Forging Smart Alliances?”

Philanthropy
Through his charitable foundation, RAGS Family Foundation, Tayur has supported independent films through Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival, including providing the funding for the annual People's Choice Award. He also serves as a policy advisor to the Polaris Project to counter human trafficking.