A student from the Management Science department is a runner-up in a national prize for the best industry-based MSc dissertation. The May Hicks prize is awarded by the Operational Research Society for the best industry-based project in Operational Research in the UK, and students from Management Science have been consistently very successful in this national competition, with three winners and one runner-up in the previous 5 years.
Julian Venken (MSc Business Analysis & Consulting with Distinction) was selected as one of the two runner-ups of the 2017 competition. Julian's project, entitled "Modelling the Social Security Agency Contact Centre", was carried out in collaboration with the Communities Analysis Division of the Scottish Government.
Julian developed a mapping of the advice and support contact centre and developed a baseline discrete-event simulation model, aimed at exploring and analysing the trade-offs between operational efficiency and customer centricity. Julian's client emphasised the impact of the project with "long lasting effects, not only through the use of the models he built, but also affecting how they build simulation models in the future."