Lee J. Krajewski is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University and Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. While at The Ohio State University, he received the University Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and the College of Business Outstanding Faculty Research Award. He initiated the Center for Excellence in Manufacturing Management and served as its director for 4 years. In addition, he received the National President’s Award and the National Award of Merit of the American Production and Inventory Control Society. He served as president of the Decision Sciences Institute and was elected a fellow of the institute in 1988. He received the Distinguished Service Award in 2003.

Lee received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Over the years, he has designed and taught courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels on topics such as operations strategy, introduction to operations management, operations design, project management, and manufacturing planning and control systems.

Lee served as the editor of Decision Sciences, was the founding editor of the Journal of Operations Management, and has served on several editorial boards. Widely published himself, Lee has contributed numerous articles to such journals as Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Production Research, Harvard Business Review, and Interfaces, to name just a few. He has received five best-paper awards. Lee’s areas of specialization include operations strategy, manufacturing planning and control systems, supply chain management, and master production scheduling.

Manoj K. Malhotra is the Jeff B. Bates Professor in the Darla Moore School of Business, and has served as the chairman of the Management Science Department at the University of South Carolina (USC), Columbia, since 2000. He is the founding director of the Center for Global Supply Chain and Process Management (GSCPM), which has been in operation since 2005. He earned an engineering undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India, in 1983, and a PhD in operations management from The Ohio State University in 1990. He is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute and is certified as a Fellow of the American Production and Inventory Management Society. Manoj has conducted seminars and consulted with firms such as Avaya, Continental, Cummins Turbo Technologies, John Deere, Metso Paper, Palmetto Health, Sonoco, Verizon, Walmart, and Westinghouse-Toshiba among others.

Apart from teaching operations management, supply chain management, and global business issues at USC, Manoj has also taught at the Terry School of Business, University of Georgia; Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in Austria; and the Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University, Australia. His research has thematically focused on the deployment of flexible resources in manufacturing and service firms, and on the interface between operations and supply chain management and other functional areas of business. His work on these and related issues has been published in leading refereed journals. Manoj has been recognized for his pedagogical and scholarly contributions through several teaching and discipline-wide research awards, including the Michael J. Mungo Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2006 from the University of South Carolina and the Carolina Trustee Professor Award in 2014. He is active in professional organizations such as Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) and Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), and has served as the program chair for international conferences at both DSI and POMS. He also serves on the editorial boards of top-tier journals in the field.

Larry P. Ritzman is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University and Professor Emeritus at Boston College. While at The Ohio State University, he served as department chairman and received several awards for both teaching and research, including the Pace Setters’ Club Award for Outstanding Research. While at Boston College, he held the Thomas J. Galligan, Jr. chair and received the Distinguished Service Award from the School of Management. He received his doctorate at Michigan State University, having had prior industrial experience at the Babcock and Wilcox Company. Over the years, he has been privileged to teach and learn more about operations management with numerous students at all levels–undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctorate.

Particularly active in the Decision Sciences Institute, Larry has served as council coordinator, publications committee chair, track chair, vice president, board member, executive committee member, doctoral consortium coordinator, and president. He was elected a fellow of the institute in 1987 and earned the Distinguished Service Award in 1996. He has received three best-paper awards. He has been a frequent reviewer, discussant, and session chair for several other professional organizations.

Larry’s areas of particular expertise are service processes, operations strategy, production and inventory systems, forecasting, multistage manufacturing, and layout. An active researcher, Larry’s publications have appeared in such journals as Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Harvard Business Review, and Management Science. He has served in various editorial capacities for several journals.