Abstract
Dr. Wallace J. “Wally” Hopp is the Herrick Chair of Manufacturing, Professor of Technology and Operations, and Associate Dean for Faculty and Research in the Ross School of Business, as well as a Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, at the University of Michigan.
Wally grew up among the farms and car factories of Michigan. He attended Michigan State, graduating in 1978 with high honor and Phi Beta Kappa in Physics. Turned down by the Peace Corps (who had no use for physics majors in those days), he married college sweetheart Melanie and attended Washington University where she supported him while he earned an MS in Technology and Human Affairs in 1979. He spent two years studying energy conservation and solar energy at the Department of Energy until Ronald Reagan was elected and deemphasized energy policy research, Wally and Melanie returned to Michigan where he earned his PhD in Industrial Engineering in 1984 under the direction of James Bean and Robert Smith. A paper from his dissertation on ergodicity in Markov decision processes won the 1985 Nicholson Prize for the best paper in operations research.
Wally joined the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department, and later the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University. There he took on a series of leadership roles, including directing the BS in Industrial Engineering, Master of Management Engineering and Master of Engineering Management programs. He also founded the BS in Manufacturing Engineering, the first accredited manufacturing engineering program at a top 25 engineering school. His biggest programmatic accomplishment was leading the Master of Management and Manufacturing program to international prominence as a center for educating manufacturing leaders. His significant impact on manufacturing education was recognized by the Sargent Award (2001), the Education Award (2006) and the Fellow Award (2011), all from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
Despite his theoretical thesis, Wally's always intended to focus on applied research. A transformational opportunity to do this came in 1987 when he joined Mark Spearman on a project for IBM to implement just‐in‐time production in a circuit board plant. To devise a practical approach for a system with a huge number of active part numbers, Mark and Wally were forced to delve into the essential mechanisms by which pull systems improve performance. This led to CONWIP (Constant Work in Process), a generalized pull system with broader applicability and simpler control than kanban. The first CONWIP paper received the Scaife Award from the Institution of Manufacturing Engineers in 1990 as the paper with the “greatest potential for assisting an advance of manufacturing practice.”
The years that followed the IBM project were exciting ones. On the personal front, Wally and Melanie adopted and raised two cherished children, Elliott and Clara, and they all eventually made their way back to Michigan. On the research front, Mark and Wally worked on a series of NSF and industry funded projects and evolved a set of principles that describe the essential behavior of manufacturing systems. They wrote up their ideas in the now classic book Factory Physics, which was named the IIE Joint Publishers Book of the Year in 1998.
Since then, Wally's research has expanded into three areas related (at least in his mind) to manufacturing. First, in the area of behavioral operations, he and various coauthors have published a string of papers seeking more realistic representation of human behavior in operations models. Second, in the area of new product innovation, he, Seyed Iravani and Bilal Gokpinar developed a highly innovative type of network analysis that contrasts product architecture with the structure of the design organization and showed that “coordination deficits” were empirically correlated with quality defects. And third, in the area of health care, his work with Mark Van Oyen and Soroush Saghafian on patient streaming in hospitals led to a paper that won the Pierskalla Best Paper Award from the INFORMS Health Care Applications Section and another that won the MSOM Student Paper Award for Soroush. Most recently, Wally and Bill Lovejoy published a new book, Hospital Operations, which presents a novel, and highly pragmatic, principles‐based approach to hospital management.
Wally feels blessed that he found his way into the field of operations management. In addition to his many rewarding research collaborations, he has had the privilege of serving as editor of Management Science, president of POMS and in many other roles in the professional community. These have convinced him that operations people not only make the world efficient; they also make it fun.