The meeting was called to order by MSOM President John McClain at 6:20 p.m.
The minutes from the Spring INFORMS meeting (in Montreal) and the Seattle MSOM Conference meeting were approved.
There was no treasurer's report, but John McClain said, "not much has changed." (The balance was $37,538 at the end of 1997.)
As of now, we are still a section instead of a society. This is due to our paperwork being late. John McClain indicated that he would make sure that all paperwork was finished before the next meeting.
Sridhar Tayur reported on the MSOM paper competition. There were 17 entries and 8 judges. Sridhar enjoyed resolving the conflicts in the final round with 4 papers. Here are the winners:
Sridhar asked that the authors please submit the papers to the MSOM journal (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management or M&SOM). This will become a regular procedure in the future. At a minimum, each of the finalists' abstracts will be printed in the journal. John McClain asked for a volunteer to head the paper competition for next year, but no one volunteered during the meeting. If interested, contact John at jom1@cornell.edu.
Tava Lennon Olsen and Rachel Zhang were thanked for organizing the Seattle sessions.
The next summer MSOM meeting (in 2000) will be held in Ann Arbor with the multi-echelon conference preceding it. The dates are June 25 for multi-echelon and June 26-27 for MSOM. The planning committee members, Izak Duenyas (duenyas@umich.edu), Tava Lennon Olsen (tlennon@engin.umich.edu) and Rachel Zhang (rzhang@umich.edu), are looking for good ideas and other suggestions for the meeting.
It is time again to nominate MSOM members for the Distinguished Service Award. Nick Hall has already sent the call for nominations over the listserve. Please contact Nick (hall.33@osu.edu) or John McClain with nominations.
News and other items of interest can continue to be sent to frank@sie.arizona.edu for the newsletter and the web page. Items can also be sent directly to the listserv: MSOM@listserv.arizona.edu .
The "MSOM Fellow" was discussed and it would be proposed as a lifetime award. The proposal for the MSOM Fellow will be sent over the listserve. The proposal is that becoming a Fellow would be based on research (and not based on teaching or service). The thought is to have less than or equal to three new Fellows per year and that the new Fellows would give a lecture at a meeting. The committee to select the new Fellows would include Fellows and non-Fellows. MSOM Vice-President Nick Hall developed this proposal and a way to formally comment on this will be included when the full Fellow proposal is distributed.
Mike Magazine reported that INFORMS will move from two meetings per year to two different meetings per year. The first meeting, in the fall, will be an enhanced version of the current meetings. The spring meeting will be replaced with a "practice" meeting (discussed below). Therefore, Salt Lake City in 2000 is the last spring meeting in our current format. The fall 2000 meeting will be held in San Antonio. In the spring of 2001, San Diego will be the location for the first practice meeting. INFORMS also announced that there will be an "international" meeting in the summer of 2001 in Hawaii.
INFORMS envisions the following for the practice meeting (which is NOT a practitioner meeting). They will plan 5-7 tracks and all speakers would be invited (many would be paid). The target length is 3 days and the term "executive education" was mentioned as a way to describe the content (potentially). INFORMS estimates they would need 300 attendees to break even and they would hope for 500 or more. The audience is the many practitioners that are members of INFORMS, but do not attend the current national meetings. It is anticipated that there would be a special rate for academics.
Since we would no longer have a "regular" spring meeting, there is an opportunity for MSOM conferences to occur more frequently than once every two years (as is the case now). There was a great deal of discussion on how we should proceed. The main proposals were to co-locate a spring 2001 MSOM conference with the 2001 practice meeting in San Diego. Another option was to have a "meeting-within-a-meeting" at the Hawaii 2001 INFORMS meeting. A third option was to hold our meeting separately from these two larger meetings (either in 2001 or 2002) in the winter, spring or summer. Preliminary approval votes were taken with each splitting the attendees pretty evenly. The executive council will consider further how to proceed.
Mike Magazine also reported on the financial health of INFORMS and noted that the society is having some troubles. They are looking for ways to cut costs and alternative ways to raise money. One way to do so is to be compensated for some of the services they provide to the sections/societies (e.g., collecting dues).
On a somewhat related matter, Mike discussed whether we want to have a formal link to "our" journal, M&SOM. As it stands now, it is an INFORMS journal and we have no formal link. After discussing this in some length, there was unanimous support for a motion to contribute at least $5,000 to the initial launch of the journal. This would relieve some of the cost burden to INFORMS (estimated at up to $120,000), who has committed to sending the first volume (two issues) to all libraries and at least the first issue to all INFORMS members. The MSOM executive council will consider how much on-going support we might provide for the journal and will bring a proposal back to the membership for discussion.
Lee Schwarz reported on M&SOM. He started by expressing his heartfelt thanks to the senior editors and all referees. The journal is going well and cycle times are still under 30 days after some 160 manuscript submissions. The inaugural volume in 1999 will have two issues (5-6 papers per issue) and there is still time to submit a manuscript for this inaugural volume. There are plans for four focussed issues of the journal. The information for these focussed issues can be found in the October 1998 newsletter or the journal website (www3.mgmt.purdue.edu/msom/).
The Franz Edelman Award nominations are due soon.
Vipal Gupta at St. Joseph's University is organizing a panel on enterprise resource planning for the Philadelphia meeting in Fall, 1999. His address is Dept. of MIS, Erivan K. Haub School of Business, St. Joseph's University, 5600 City Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19131, Ph: (610)660-1622, Fax: (610) 660-1229, Email: gupta@sju.edu. Here is the proposal: The INFORMS meeting in Philadelphia provides an ideal forum for organizing a panel to discuss curriculum issues and research opportunities with regard to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. SAP AG (a German Company with North American Headquarters near Philadelphia) recently started a program to help Universities integrate ERP in their curricula. I would like to propose a panel discussion of curriculum issues and research opportunities in ERP and was wondering if your section would be willing to sponsor it. I will have some officials from SAP participate plus other academicians with experience with ERP/SAP teaching and research.
The meeting was adjourned at 7:30 p.m.