Arena Newsletter and Blog

Shortly after the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) took over responsibility for screening all passengers and their carry-on baggage at 450+ US commercial service airports, an aviation industry expert commented that the problem is not a security problem but an industrial engineering problem. That observation was true then and remains true today.  The challenges of thoroughly screening the hundreds of thousands of US passengers and their carry-on baggage at a rate that facilitates commerce is immense, making process-thinking essential.  

How to Keep Costs Down and Customer Experience Up in an Omni-channel World

Chances are you’re no stranger to omni-channel service – almost every company engages its customers through multiple channels, from phone to web. However, businesses are often too quick to equate high-touch – and high-cost – agents with a better customer experience and lower-cost digital interactions with a worse one.

The high-speed packaging industry is getting faster, and more flexible driven with innovative disruptor technologies.

As an industrial engineer our goal, every day, is to sell change.

My first foray, over a decade ago, into agent based modeling (ABM) was developing one as a member of store operations for a specialty retailer in Columbus, Ohio.  The objective was to model shopper and associate behavior in a store with the primary intent to derive the optimal shopper-to-associate ratio by brand, time of year, and day of week.