Gabriel Bitran

Gabriel Bitran, Chair Professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has produced a substantial body on operations management in the service and manufacturing sectors. Of late, his research has centered on the acquisition and retention of consumers in the Internet environment and service industry. Gabriel Bitran’s more recent interests also include value pricing, customer relationship management systems, supply chain management, and service excellence.Early in his professional life, Gabriel Bitran delved into operations methodologies. While pursuing his doctoral thesis at MIT, he produced results on the framework of admissible points in relation to cone dominance and conducted related studies of duality for optimization problems. At the time, he and his advisor, Tom Magnanti, were among the first scientists to generate algorithmic and duality solutions to fractional programming problems. Concurrently, Gabriel Bitran built on the research performed by Arnoldo Hax and Harlan Meal, authors of a seminal study on hierarchical planning for large-scale systems that reported on a number of heuristics still in use today. With Arnoldo Hax, Gabriel Bitran co-authored a paper on a methodology that permitted a more formal analysis of heuristics. It also pinpointed instances where the process could generate unworkable answers. In subsequent papers, he added feedback mechanisms between the hierarchies and other features, thereby expanding the process to large-scale production systems. Until the late 1980s, most of Professor Bitran’s work dealt with this methodology. Between 1988 and 1998, he studied complex production processes with sponsorships from semiconductor and telecommunications companies.Apart from his research, Professor Bitran serves on the editorial boards of several journals and held the post of Editor-in-Chief of Management Science for six years. Moreover, he acted as the President of the Production and Operations Management Society.