These shoes were made for walking ... to the Edelman Award competition!

Each year, finalists in the Franz Edelman Award Competition demonstrate how advanced analytics and operations research are solving real problems at massive scale – from the products we buy and the packages we receive to the healthcare we rely on and the policies that shape our communities. Joining me today are members of the team from ECCO, the globally recognized footwear brand known for its vertically integrated supply chain and retail operations. Managing inventory across hundreds of retail locations around the world is a massive logistical challenge. Historically, store replenishment decisions were made manually, which often led to inconsistent ordering, operational inefficiencies, and missed opportunities to optimize inventory placement. To address this, ECCO's data & AI team developed a powerful analytics system that uses large-scale stochastic mixed-integer programming to automate store replenishment decisions across their global retail network.