Jeppesen's 100k+ charts swamped production; OR cut cost ~10% and profit +24%.

Jeppesen Sanderson makes and distributes safety-critical flight manuals to hundreds of thousands of pilots and hundreds of airlines; service deteriorated as a catalogue of over 100,000 aviation charts overwhelmed the production system.

The team developed optimization-based decision support for production planning and a separate method for evaluating investments in production technology, letting Jeppesen make better scheduling and capital decisions than manual practice allowed.

Reduced lateness and better processes cut customer complaints, reduced costs by nearly 10%, increased profit by 24%, and led to the creation of a dedicated OR group; the work won the 2000 INFORMS Edelman Award.

Optimize production planning, not individual orders

A 100,000-item product line is not schedulable by hand

Optimization trades lateness for on-time at lower cost

A value model turns capital decisions into a solved problem

Measured: cost down ~10%, profit up 24%

When growth breaks a service process, fix it with a scheduling and capacity model, not more people; pair it with a method for buying technology so the model decides what to automate next.

The models and the new OR group spread to other parts of Jeppesen, and OR-based decision support became company-wide rather than a one-off fix for the chart backlog.