Operations Management & Operations Research (OM/OR) is an interdisciplinary concentration of ESSEC Business School PhD Program. It provides students a structured education in quantitative research methods and complex tools for management science. It focuses on theoretical, empirical and methodological research of managerial decisions that drive all disciplines interested in the process of formulating, evaluating and executing high quality decision making, possibly applied to economics, management, marketing, digital business, finance, risk management, operations, supply chain management. The period of courses lasts for 1,5 year, with Research Apprenticeship Modules (RAMs) that start in the first year (under the supervision of a Professor) and aim at producing a first research paper before the Dissertation Proposal, which takes place at the end of the second year.
Each applicant has to choose a single specialization in the application file BEFORE entering the program, explaining her/his specific motivation for the selected specialization. There are open positions in both specializations each year.
Operations Management not only concerns the traditional creation, production, and delivery of products and services, but it takes a broader view that comprises several areas such as supply chain management, logistics, purchasing management, project management, and new product development. All these fields have a strong operational focus and a potential impact on the successful management of operations. This subfield is hosted by the OMOR cluster and the OM department.
Operations Research concerns both the application of quantitative methods to optimally solve planning decision problems. Our faculty performs research on the development of new methods and applications in Operations and Supply Chain management (supply chain coordination, production planning, transportation and routing, facility location, network design, sustainable operations, quality management). This subfield is hosted by the OMOR cluster comprising professors of operations research and operations management from the IDO department.
Recent research interests of our faculty include:
- Advanced Decision Theory
- Continuous-time Dynamic Games (with applications to supply chain coordination and sustainability, pollution control, renewable natural resource harvesting, etc)
- Optimal control Theory (with applications to operations and quality management, epidemic control, sustainable operations management, etc)
- Robust optimization
- Selection problems with choice models (application to assortment, facility location)
- Bilevel programming
- Decomposition methods (Column Generation, Branch-and-Price-and-Cut, Benders decomposition)
The courses in OM/OR cover the following topics: introductory optimization methods (Linear Programming, duality, graph problems, dynamic programming), advanced optimization methods (decomposition methods, Column Generation, Benders decomposition, cutting plane methods, robust optimization, optimal control theory, differential game theory), technology management and new product development, supply chain management, sustainable operations, dynamic methods, advanced decision theory, applied statistics, econometrics, numerical resolution methods.
Coding skills are important to implement models, methodologies and solving algorithms. Coding languages and softwares are presented in various courses.
Laurent ALFANDARI is Professor in the Department of Information Systems, Data Analytics and Operations, IDO and holds a Doctorate in Operations Research from Université Paris IX Dauphine. His research fields are: operations research, discrete optimization and applications to operations management (network design, city logistics, scheduling, production planning, routing problems and facility location).
Diego DELLE DONNE is Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Systems, Data Analytics and Operations, IDO and holds a Doctorate in Computer Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Prior to joining ESSEC in 2020, he held an Assistant Professor position at the National University of General Sarmiento in Argentina. His research interests cover topics around operations research, combinatorial optimization, applied mathematics, integer programming and graph theory, both theoretical studies and real-life applied projects.
Philippe-Pierre DORNIER is Professor in the Department of Operations Management and holds a Doctorat en Ingénierie et Gestion from École des Mines de Paris. His research is focused on change management in supply chain and on optimization of the sales point within the supply chain.
Fouad El OUARDIGHI is Professor of Operations Management and holds a doctorate in Business Administration from Université Paris Ouest and a Phd from ESSEC Business School. His research aims to develop an interdisciplinary approach in areas such as supply chain coordination and strategy, the interface of operations and marketing management, environmental economics and sustainable operations/supply chain management, R&D competition and epidemic control, and more generally to promoting the use of dynamic methods in economics and management science.
Ivana LJUBIC is Full Professor at ESSEC and she holds a Doctorate in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology and a Habilitation in Operations Research from the University of Vienna. She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Operations Research, Transportation Science, Networks. Her research interests include combinatorial optimization, optimization under uncertainty and bilevel optimization with applications in network design, logistics and transportation.
Felix PAPIER is a Supply Chain Management Professor in the Operations Management Department at ESSEC Business School since 2011 and Holder of the ESSEC Global Circular Economy Chair. His research and teaching focuses on supply chain and operations strategy, sustainable and socially-responsible operations, circular economy, supply chain due diligence and information sharing in supply chains, and humanitarian operations. He has been the Academic Director of the ESSEC & Mannheim Executive MBA (2015-2017) and the Dean of ESSEC Pre-Experience Programs (2017-2022).
Sara REZAEE VESSAL is Associate Professor at the Department of Operations Management. She received her Doctorate in Operations and Supply Chain Management from HEC Paris. Her research interests include collaboration in supply chain, new product development and collaboration in highly uncertain projects, value of information in coordinating supply chains, and sustainable supply chain.
Canberk UCEL is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at ESSEC Business School. His research focuses on challenges faced by small firms and micro-enterprises, which employ two-thirds of the global workforce. Currently, his work in the agriculture sector uses operational data from thousands of farms, collected through industry partnerships, to offer practical insights for companies and policymakers. His studies, which have earned academic awards and industry recognition, emphasize the economic, social, and environmental impact of micro-enterprises. Lately, he has been exploring digital advisory tools based on Large Language Models to aid practice/technology adoption. Canberk holds a PhD and MSc from The Wharton School. He previously taught at Bilkent University and continues to collaborate with the Sustainable Business Initiative at INSEAD, where he served as a Visiting Scholar.
Bocconi University (Italy), Mercy College, New York (USA)The Lebanese American University (Lebanon),Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico), Curtin Business School, Perth, (Australia).
