Faculty Directory
Michael Watson

Education

PhD 1996, Industrial Engineering and Management Science, Northwestern University

MS 1993, Industrial Engineering and Management Science, Northwestern University

BA 1992, Math and Economics, Bellarmine University


Biography

I've taught at Northwestern University as an adjunct professor since 1999. However, up until 2023, I was working full-time in industry. In the Fall of 2023, I joined the faculty full-time.  

My career has been implementing ideas we teach in IEMS, MEM, and MLDS for Fortune 500 companies.  I've done this in software, consulting, and start-ups. 

The first start-up was LogicTools, a supply chain optimization software company.  LogicTools was acquired by ILOG (CPLEX) and then IBM in 2009.  In 2013, I co-founded and was the CEO of Opex Analytics, an AI company (data science and optimization).  Opex Analytics was sold to LLamasoft in 2019 and to Coupa in 2020.  

I'm hoping to bring my industry experiences to the students and classes.

Research Interests

AI frameworks and business applications

Supply chain analytics (especially network design)

Optimization

Operations


Courses Taught

  • IEMS Client Project Challenge
  • IEMS Supply Chain Modeling and Analysis
  • MLDS Optimization - MEM Operations Excellence
  • MEM Management Analytics

Selected Publications

Book: Supply Chain Network Design (on Amazon)

Book: Managerial Analytics (on Amazon)

Blog:  Mike Talks AI.

For Students

Please feel free to stop by or set up a meeting to talk about careers. I'm happy to talk about the software and consulting industries as well as Fortune 500-type companies (especially manufacturers, retailers, and transportation providers). I can talk about working for start-ups, creating a start-up, or working for a more established company. I can share my experience with supply chain and especially supply chain design and inventory.

For Our Industry Partners

I'll be working to maintain IEMS's connection to industry partners. We've done great work on these projects. Here is a 5-minute video on projects for Lurie Children’s Hospital (optimizing scheduling in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit), QSIDE (identifying sentencing biases in the Illinois court system), and UPS (network and capacity design for a large hub). In addition, teams have helped Ferrara Candy Company develop better ways to fill bags of candy and helped Sunairio develop a sophisticated model to predict loss of wind turbine power due to icing.