Roger R. Crane

Brief Biography

Roger Ryan Crane was a founding member of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and its fourth president. In addition to his own service to TIMS, he encouraged his staff at the firms he worked at to be involved in the organization. Crane was a Council member of both TIMS and the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA). He was one of the pivotal figures in establishing and encouraging collaboration between the two organizations. In addition to uniting ORSA and TIMS on such issues as jointly-awarding major accolades, such as the George E. Kimball Medal and the John von Neumann Theory Prize, Crane played a very influential role in convincing the leadership of both to share a national meeting.

Crane was educated at the University of Toronto and, upon graduation, joined the Operations Evaluation Group at MIT from 1948 to 1951. After earning his masters from MIT, he went on to Westinghouse to establish and direct the company’s OR/MS groups.  The Operations Research Department at Melpar, Inc, a Westinghouse subsidiary, was established in March 1952. Crane led this group and initially focused on railroad operations. His team used queueing analysis to analyze the delay of freight cars and employed Monte Carlo simulation to solve rail problems. One study also investigated improvements in the utilization of switching engineers. In 1955, Crane took on a similar position at Touche Ross Bailey and Smart. The early successes at these organizations had a strong influence on the overall growth of OR/MS in industry and academia.

Crane worked closely with University of California, Berkeley professor C. West Churchman. Churchman and Crane held a series of roundtable discussions for managers and OR practitioners at the firehouse in Bolinas, California, north of San Francisco. Through such efforts, Churchman and Crane did much to expand the practice of OR/MS and to make its potential known to high-level managers. In 1960, the two co-founded the journal Management Technology. Crane served as the publication’s editor from 1961 until 1966. The journal was established to make OR/MS more accessible to industrial personnel and managers than the more theory-driven and academic Management Science. Today, Crane’s effort thrives in the continued publications of Management Technology’s spiritual successor, Interfaces.

In 1968, Crane became senior vice president of Science Management Corporation. He then formed a consulting organization, Roger Crane Group Inc., in 1975. Later, this organization included both Decision Support Facilities Ltd. and Roger Crane Consultants Ltd. and had offices in London and Milan. Dr. Crane was also a director of Moped S.P.A. and chairman of Information Based Organizations Ltd.

Other Biographies

INFORMS. Miser-Harris Presidential Gallery: Roger Crane. Accessed February 27, 2015. (link)