Honored OR Society Goodeve Medal Winners 3M Have Lanner Simulation Ties

HOUSTON, TX, March 13, 2011 (Press-News.org) Lanner, the leading simulation specialist, congratulates its established business partner 3M, honored with a Goodeve Medal from the Operational Research (OR) Society in recognition of its work in simulation driven evaluation.

3M's award-winning case orientated paper published in the society's Journal of Operational Research described how Lanner's flagship WITNESS software system enabled the large multi-national research and development company to evaluate performance improvement gained through introducing product postponement into its distribution operations.

Product postponement involves altering the timing of products within the supply chain and investigates if it is cost-effective to delay certain manufacturing processes, such as assembly, until a customer order is received.

Using WITNESS, distribution planners at 3M evaluated the trade-off between stock holding costs and delivery performance to customers. Honoring the paper's authors the OR Society citation stated that,

"The judges were impressed with the way that customer ordering behavior had been realistically modeled and by the resulting decision support tool that could tune the system for best performance as well as investigating what-if scenarios. The model is scalable to include more customers, branches, stock holding units and products and the company now intends to apply the tools to a wider range of products."

Congratulating its award-winning partner 3M, David Jones, CEO, Lanner comments, "On behalf of Lanner I congratulate the honorees recognized in this prestigious industry award.

He continues, "We're ecstatic that our long-term partners at 3M have been recognized for their work in simulation, more so knowing our software's involvement. Lanner products allow firms to eliminate inefficiency, improve customer service, and gain competitive edge through the accurate evaluation of business decisions before implementation, and in this case study WITNESS facilitated just that."

This award was named in memory of Sir Charles Goodeve, one of the founders and pioneers of civilian Operational Research after World War 2 and a leader for many years of the OR Club and Society.

The Goodeve Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of OR published in the Journal of the OR Society (JORS) or OR Insight (ORI), within the relevant year.

Read the Operational Research Society Release at http://tinyurl.com/Goodeve2011

About Lanner:
Any business can use the proven simulation software and services delivered by Lanner to maximize its performance and optimize its use of resources.

Lanner is an international company with headquarters in the UK. Its simulation software has delivered answers for commercial businesses and government organizations since 1979, helping them move toward operational perfection.

Lanner's customers include some of the largest and most successful organizations in the world and its technology is embedded within leading software vendors' products. For more information, visit http://www.lanner.com or follow @WitnessSim on Twitter.

About 3M
3M captures the spark of new ideas and transforms them into thousands of ingenious products. Our culture of creative collaboration inspires a never-ending stream of powerful technologies that make life better. 3M is the innovation company that never stops inventing. With $27 billion in sales, 3M employs about 80,000 people worldwide and has operations in more than 65 countries. For more information, visit http://www.3M.com or follow @3MNews on Twitter.