Published: April 5, 2025
Welcome to the latest in our special series of Resoundingly Human podcasts highlighting the finalist teams for the 2025 Franz Edelman Award, the Nobel Prize of Analytics, which will be awarded at the upcoming 2025 INFORMS Analytics+ Conference in Indianapolis this April.
These finalist projects represent teams from around the world who have leveraged advanced analytics to transform their organizations, address their most significant challenges, and better serve their customers and communities. Today I’m joined by members of the team representing Amazon to discuss their finalist project in the leadup to the Franz Edelman competition.
This wasn’t just a small change, it really impacted the way we think about network design, network planning, our fulfillment and software systems, just really building from the ground up the way we think about customer fulfillment within Amazon. And really the performance of the change and the KPIs really speak to the performative nature of this project. Once we launched we say in-region fulfillment improve from 62 to 76 percent. We’ve seen customer fulfillment distance, so travel distance of a package improve by 10 percent since deploying this. And really we continue to set, and then break all time speed records for inventory selection and availability for next day or same day for our customers.
Interviewed this episode:
Nick McCabe
Amazon
Nick McCabe is a distinguished leader in supply chain and logistics optimization with over 20 years of transformative achievements in transportation engineering and network design. As Director of Network Design Planning and Engineering (NDPE), he has successfully led several high-impact initiatives, including the implementation of the regionalization network design program. Throughout his tenure at Amazon, Nick has advanced through increasingly challenging senior roles, spanning Transportation Analytics to Network Scheduling.
Nick holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, an MBA, and Six Sigma certification, complementing his extensive expertise in SQL data modeling and analysis. His career exemplifies the integration of technical proficiency, strategic thinking, and leadership capabilities in driving transformational change in supply chain and logistics management.
Amitabh Sinha
Amazon
Amitabh Sinha is at the Modeling and Optimization group at Amazon. He works on several areas in optimization and analytics, primarily in the space of network optimization of Amazon’s supply chain. Most recently, his team worked on the science behind Amazon’s Regionalization initiative, driving simultaneous improvements in cost and speed in the face of a rapidly growing supply chain network.
Before joining Amazon in 2017, he was an Associate Professor of Technology and Operations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. At UM, he taught classes in operations, statistics and data science. His academic research areas included omnichannel operations, supply chain management, networks, and optimization algorithms. He received his PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and his MS in Mathematics and Computer Applications from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
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Episode Transcript
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Tags: Amazon, Analytics Conference