CSCMP names winners of its top awards

About the same time that the Swedish Academy began announcing the winners of this year's Nobel Prizes, the Council of Supply Chain Management named the winners of its top awards, among the most notable in the supply chain profession.

Arthur Mesher, CEO of the The Descartes Systems Group Inc., receive the Council's 2008 Distinguished Service Award (DSA). The DSA goes each year to an individual who has made significant contributions to the art and science of supply chain and logistics management. Mesher was honored during one of the keynote sessions at last week's annual educational conference in Denver. "Our discipline is making the world a better place," Mesher said in his acceptance remarks.

In announcing the award, CSCMP cited Mesher's accomplishments. It noted his development of communications tools and his turnaround success at Descartes, a Canadian-based provider of on-demand transportation management tools.

Dr. Dilay váelebi received the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Award. váelebi was honored at the CSCMP Educators Conference prior to the main conference for her research entitled, "Stochastic Lot Sizing in a Centralized Distribution Network." The research aimed at developing a mathematical model, verified through simulation, that would help determine the best lot sizes for a two-level distribution network. She received her doctorate earlier this year from Istanbul Technical University.

Dr. Photis Panayides, associate professor of shipping economics at Cyprus University of Technology, received the 2008 Bernard J. La Londe Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Business Logistics. Panayides won for his paper "Effects of Organizational Learning in Third-Party Logistics."

Finally Gubio Henrique, a senior majoring in transportation and logistics management at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, was named the winner of the 2008 CSCMP Undergraduate Paper Competition. Henrique's paper, "Reducing Transportation Costs at RSC," focuses on potential solutions to the rapid escalation of fuel costs.