Samir Shah

Mr. Shah, who contributed articles on quantitative methods to IRMI.com, is a managing consultant in Tillinghast-Towers Perrin’s Washington DC office with 15 years of consulting experience, serving a wide range of clients in risk management, actuarial services, organizational design, process improvement, and optimizing operations. He specializes in the application of operations research methods such as computer simulation, optimization, decisions, and risk analysis to modeling business dynamics and decision-making.

Mr. Shah works across multiple lines of business at Towers Perrin in developing intellectual capital and working with clients to develop unique and customized applications of engineering sciences to management decision-making. He is a leading member of the firm’s enterprise risk management efforts and is a coauthor of a monograph on the topic. Mr. Shah is also a member of the Strategy and Organization practice, where he is active in providing client services in business literacy, strategic decision-making, workforce planning, and organizational design.

On a recent project for a major oil company, Mr. Shah was a leading member of a team working on integrating interest rate risk, exchange rate risk, commodity price risk, and hazard risk to develop integrated risk management strategies. For a global pharmaceutical company, he developed a business simulation model to help managers develop action plans to increase cash flow. For a global retailer, Mr. Shah developed a new method for determining the optimum level and allocation of investment in labor (e.g., employee pay, benefits, training, and work environment programs) to maximize retention. He has also developed a technique using computer simulation modeling to link decisions regarding workforce planning to a firm’s ability to meet its business plan. The model can be used to analyze and optimize these decisions based on financial and operational performance. He works often with call centers to optimize the performance of operations and to train and transition modeling capability to operations managers. Mr. Shah has developed several virtual call centers by creating a computer simulation model that operations managers can use to make decisions on staffing, scheduling, organization, process design, and technology investments.

Some of Mr. Shah’s recent clients include Alcoa, American Express, Baxter, Chevron, The Gap, GTE, McDonalds, Mellon Bank, and Texaco. Mr. Shah holds bachelor of science and master of science degrees in industrial engineering and management sciences from Northwestern University and is currently in the doctoral program. He is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and an active member of the following professional organizations: International Association of Financial Engineers, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, and American Academy of Actuaries.