About

Sham Kekre is a Distinguished Service Professor of Operations Management at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Rochester, an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and has been involved in various public service projects, including logistics cost management for Bosch Siemens and strategy and global supply chain management for Kodak. His research and professional focus include operations management, supply chain logistics, and strategic planning, with a history of leadership roles in global supply chain operations and logistics development.

Research topics

• Computer science
• Operations research
• Operations management
• Mathematical optimization
• Industrial engineering

Selected publications

• Flexible Milk-Runs for Stochastic Vehicle Routing

  Journal of Cell Science · 2018-06-30 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  We study a vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands in which the goal is to find an optimal set of vehicle routes, such that the capacity of each vehicle is not exceeded with a given probability. We introduce ‘flexible milk-runs’, or flex-runs, to model this problem as a set covering problem to find (near-)optimal solutions. We apply our methodology to design new freight routes for the North-American division of the Bosch/Siemens Home Appliances Corporation. Our computational experiments indicate an expected transportation cost reduction of up to 25%, while at the same time the new routes realize overall increase in robustness with respect to demand fluctuations.

  OA PDFDOI

• A Founding Framework for Addressing Obesity in Qatar Using Mobile Technologies

  Communications in computer and information science · 2011-01-01 · 7 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• How Kodak transformed its service parts supply chain

  Supply chain management review · 2005-10-01

  articleSenior author

  Subtitle: To stay ahead of the digital transformation in its merketplace, Eastman Kodak Company knew that it had to go through a transformation of its own in its service parts supply chain. The guiding principles in this endeavor would be velocity, value, and visibility. This is a story of that transformation --the motivation, the methods, and the results.

  Publisher

• Engineering changes and time delays: A field investigation

  International Journal of Production Economics · 1992-12-01 · 31 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Multi-item batching heuristics for minimization of queueing delays

  European Journal of Operational Research · 1992-04-01 · 62 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Batching Policy in Kanban systems

  Journal of Manufacturing Systems · 1989-01-01 · 71 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Dynamic Lot-Sizing Problem with Startup and Reservation Costs

  Operations Research · 1987-06-01 · 76 citations

  article

  Dynamic lot-sizing models often assume that a production system incurs a fixed cost in each period that production is positive. In this paper, we consider a model with a startup cost incurred for switching on the production facility and a separate reservation cost charged for keeping the facility on whether or not it is used for production. Computationally, this problem is as hard as the usual model; the general capacitated case is NP-hard. We present a dynamic programming algorithm for the uncapacitated case, and a branch-and-bound approach using Lagrangian relaxation for the capacitated problem. We report computational experience on both the quality of the bounds employed and the effectiveness of the algorithm.

  PublisherDOI

• Capacity analysis of a manufacturing cell

  Journal of Manufacturing Systems · 1987-01-01 · 36 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Lotsizing in Multi-Item Multi- Machine Job Shops

  IIE Transactions · 1985-09-01 · 156 citations

  article

  Abstract A great many manufacturing facilities can be described as closed job shops which process multiple items through multiple work centers for stock or for assembly. The performance of these shops is strongly dependent on the batching policies employed for work in the shop. In particular, waiting time in queue and total manufacturing lead time for batches are functions of lotsizes. In turn these affect work-in-process costs, safety stock requirements, schedule performance and part coordination for assembly. The relationship between lot-sizing and shop performance is represented using a queueing network model which is then embedded in an optimization routine that searches for optimal lot sizes.

  PublisherDOI

• Lot-Sizing and Lead-time Performance in a Manufacturing Cell

  INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics · 1985-04-01 · 146 citations

  article

  Many complex multi-item manufacturing shops have high levels of work-in-process because of queueing delays at machines and consequently long manufacturing lead times. These delays are directly related to lot sizes. Two alternative approaches applied to modeling a manufacturing cell—simulation and a novel analytical lot-sizing model (Q-LOTS)—provide very similar results and validate the analytical model.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Uday S. Karmarkar

  16 shared

• Sunder Kekre

  14 shared

• Susan Freeman

  4 shared

• G.G. Hegde

  Institute of Industrial Engineering

  2 shared

• Willem‐Jan van Hoeve

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1 shared

• Ben Peterson

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1 shared

• Mark Brienzi

  1 shared

• Selma Limam Mansar

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Operations Research

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1990

• M.S., Operations Research

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1986

• B.S., Mathematics and Statistics

  University of Pune

  1984