The winner of the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences, sponsored by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) association for analytics professionals, has been announced, and it is something of a surprise since an award for outstanding operations research would typically be assumed to be a defense contractor or a computer company.
The winner was the Swiss company Syngenta, best known for making pesticides used in agriculture. Though we might think farming is as simple as planting seeds and watering them and taking produce to a farmer's market, legacy methods are not sufficient to meet today’s food needs and haven't been for 200 years. Syngenta received the 2015 award by applying analytics and operations research (O.R.) methods to make better breeding decisions, reducing the time and cost required to develop crops with high productivity. That data-based transformation led to Syngenta creating four O.R. tools to support one or more key “pipeline” phases: variety design, variety development, and variety evaluation. They beat out IBM's Big Data tennis forecasting, Defense Logistics Agency, Ingram Micro, and a US Army/Sandia National Lab project.
Syngenta’s trait introgression (TI) tool and the breeding project lead (BPL) tool make processes within the pipeline more efficient - to transfer favorable traits from one soybean variety to another. It uses the BPL tool to develop varieties with higher productivity. With each tool, the project lead compares alternative TI and breeding strategies until a strategy is identified with a high probability of success, as well as minimal cost and time. Yield trial design (YTD) optimizer and data quality cart (DQC) tools are supporting decisions that impact the quality of variety selection and advancement toward commercialization.
The new analytical tools improved project lead training, decision-making, and planning, resulting in cost avoidance for soybean R&D of more than $287 million from 2012-2016 and substantially improving the probability of successfully delivering a portfolio value exceeding $1.5 billion. Syngenta says they are undertaking a multi-year effort to customize that soybean R&D and launch similar tools across all major crops.