You are a Senior Manager at MSC-Logistics overseeing the shipping department. MSC-Logistics is a healthy, mid-sized company(similar to UPS/FedEx/DHL) with $350 million in yearly profit and 93% customer satisfaction rating. Currently, your team’s objective is to minimize the amount of late deliveries to ensure customer satisfaction. One day the Finance Director approaches you and tells you that instead of minimizing late deliveries, she wants to prioritize revenue to appease shareholders. The Vice President of Marketing overhears your conversation and suggests that the delivery drivers should instead spend more amount of time on the road to advertise the company logo. This in turn will result in wider brand recognition and more customers. Lastly, the Vice President of Operations joins the conversation to recommend another business objective but is cut off before she can provide a suggestion. From your conversation,

• Which business objective do you think is the most important and why?

• Before the Vice President of Operations was cutoff, what do you think her suggestion was going to be?

• How would you convince MSC-Logistics’ leadership team (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.) to choose a particular business objective function?

• What data do you need to support your claim?

• What teams within MSC-Logistics would you need to collaborate with to implement your idea?

• After your presentation to leadership, in private, the CTO inquires about mathematically optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously, but during your meeting you are unsure if it is possible. The CTO recalls that it is possible and has read about it in various places. The CTO then tasks you with finding an application of multi-objective optimization to share, and then deciding if MSC-Logistics should have a multi-objective business model. What application do you find to share with the CTO and should MSC-Logistics consider optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously?