CANA Finishes 2018 Strong with the INFORMS Annual Meeting & MORS Emerging Techniques Fo

Professional societies are important for many reasons. They provide their members with a vehicle to learn, collaborate, and share their work with others in the same profession. How many people would want to receive life-threatening disease treatment from a doctor that is still using techniques that were state of the art in the 1990s? The same is true of analytics. Here are the top three reasons for CANA to participate in professional societies:

1. Keeps us sharp. Knowing state of the art and new analytical solutions allows us to find the right fit for an analytical tool when addressing customer needs.

2. Sharing our work. We love to share our analytics, get feedback, and inspire discussion.

3. Giving back to the committee. All analytics professionals deserve encouragement and support. Connecting and continuing a long-term dialogue with analytics professionals from industry, government, and academia allows everyone to keep moving forward no matter what an individual's professional goals may be.

CANA achieved all three of these goals at two events at the end of 2018.

Team CANA at an event (From left to right; Norm Reitter, Carol DeZwarte, Jerom Dixon, Lucia Darrow, Walt DeGrange, and Rob Cranston)

2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting

CANA was on hand for the largest INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) event of the year. Over 7,000 attendees enjoyed over 70 tracks of presentations during the four-day event. There were plenty of presentations on the latest research on many topics for industries that use analytics (e.g., Healthcare, Transportation, Mining, Supply Chain) and methodologies (e.g., machine learning, simulation, optimization) to sharpen our skills. CANA’s Walt DeGrange (Director of Analytics Capabilities) also presented his sports analytics impact presentation, a three-year analytics project to determine if analytics is making an impact at the professional level in the United States. CANA also participates as leaders and members of multiple committees throughout INFORMS. CANA is by far the smallest company represented in most, if not all, the committees with much larger companies and academic institution representatives making up a majority of the committee members. This involvement in these critical committees allows CANA to influence the future of analytics and to contribute significantly to moving forward analytics in organizations - providing more direct contributions than many other analytics companies with less than 25 employees.

Images from the INFORMS 2018 Annual Meeting

MORS Emerging Techniques Forum

The MORS (Military Operations Research Society) Emerging Techniques Forum (ETF) occurred in December and is a showcase of cutting-edge analytical methods and using these tools to answer the toughest questions in both the commercial and government space. CANA took advantage of this opportunity to showcase analysis performed by its outstanding analytical professionals.

Lucia Darrow (Operations Research Analyst) presented a poster on the impact of using the INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model in determining the effects of applying advanced analytics methods to organizations. Her poster presented an analysis of data collected over the past four years including over 20 analytics capability assessments.

Jerome Dixon (Senior Operations Research Analyst) presented his work on using Machine Learning (ML) to address the challenging issue of developing a Bill of Material (BOM). His research provides a unique solution to answer a business question shared in both the commercial and government arenas.

Also, finally, Walt DeGrange participated as a panel member in a discussion identifying and hiring high-caliber analytical professionals. This forum allowed CANA to share with the community what sets CANA apart from other analytics providers such as our Why Statement "Create an environment that allows our team and clients more time to focus on the things that matter most[,]" and the ability to share analytical knowledge easily through monthly one-hour CANA Analytics Roundtables. CANA was by far the smallest organization represented on the panel and could provide that unique small business perspective to the audience.

Images from the MORS Emerging Technologies Forum

These two events highlight how CANA takes advantage of professional societies to magnify its analytics impact on the world. The objectives of learning, sharing, and giving back were all accomplished through the participation of the CANA Team at the end of 2018. Bring on 2019!

To learn more about CANA or our Industry Experts go to https://www.canallc.com

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