Marshall Fisher

Marshall Fisher is the UPS Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is also Co-Director of the Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management at Wharton. His work focuses on supply chainmanagement and retailing.

Fisher has taught at Wharton since 1975. In 2001, he was named the UPS Transportation Professor for the Private Sector in 2001. From 1986 to 2001, he was the Stephen J. Heyman Department Professor. From 1986 to 1989, Fisher served as Chairperson of the Decision Sciences Department. From 1977 to 1986, he was Associate Director, Doctoral Programs. Before joining the Wharton faculty, he held an appointment as Assistant Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. Fisher has held visiting appointments at the Department of Operations Research, Cornell University; Harvard University; Jiao Tong University, Shanghai; and the Graduate School of Management, Delft, the Netherlands. From 1965 to 1966, he was a systems engineer at IBM.

Fisher has published numerous articles in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Business Review and Operations Research. His current projects include: a Sloan Foundation Industry study of retailing; managing logistics supply chains to improve the ability to match supply with demand for short-lifetime, high-fashion products with volatile demand; and managing product portfolios in an environment of high product variety. Fisher also published many chapters in edited volumes.

Fisher has provided consulting services to a wide array of global companies regarding logistics planning, manufacturing strategy, and supply chain restructuring. These companies include: Ahold; Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.; American Pacific Enterprises; Americold; Avon; Bausch & Lomb; Bertelsman Music Group; Best Buy; Bulgari; Campbell Soup; Charming Shoppes; Digital Equipment Corporation; Defense Logistics Analysis Office; E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Company; Edward Don and Company; Exxon Corporation; Frito-Lay Inc.; General Motors; IBM ; Integral; Kenneth Cole; Linens ‘n Things; Lutron; Mattel; Motorola; National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Nike; Nokia; Provident National Bank; Scott Paper; Speigel; Trans World Entertainment; and USM Corporation.

Fisher has received numerous awards and honors. In 2007, he received the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science Kimball Medal for Distinguished Service to the Institute and to the Profession of Operations Research and Management Science. He won the 2005 Institute for Operations Research and Management Science Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award, given in honor of Philip McCord Morse, MIT Professor and one of the founders of the field of Operations Research. In 2005, he received the Production and Operations Management Society Fellow Award. Fisher delivered the 13th Annual E. Leonard Arnoff Memorial Lecture on the Practice of Management Science, University of Cincinnati in 2004. Also that year, his paper entitled The Lagrangian Relaxation Method for Solving Integer Programming Problems was voted by the membership of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science as one of the ten most influential papers published in Management Science during its 50 year history. In 2003, Fisher was listed by ISI Web of Science Highly Cited as one of the 250 most cited researchers in economics and management. In 2002, he received the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society Fellow Award. He was awarded the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science Fellow Award in 2002. He has received the Wharton School MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Awards for Teaching Excellence several times—in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Professor Fisher was elected to National Academy of Engineering in 1994. In 1984, he received the National Council of Physical Distribution Management E. Grosvenor Plowman award for the paper, Computers in Transportation: From Integration to Intelligence (co-authored with Ramchandran Jaikumar). In 1983, he won the Institute of Management Science Edelman Prize, awarded to the best implementation of management science in that year, for developing and implementing a very large optimization system to control deliveries of liquid oxygen and nitrogen (with others). In 1977, he received the Lanchester Prize, awarded to the outstanding publication in the field of operations research in that year, for the paper, Location of Bank Accounts to Optimize Float: An Analytic Study of Exact and Approximate Algorithms.

Fisher earned his Ph.D. from the Interdepartmental Program in Operations Research (1970), S.M. at the Sloan School of Management (1969), and S.B. in Electrical Engineering (1965), all at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.