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Alumni Spotlight: Daniel Madwed
Happy Holidays
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Where in the World Is CHEPS
Alumni Spotlight: Daniel Madwed
If you’ve used DoorDash to get food delivered, you might want to thank CHEPS alumnus Daniel Madwed for your dinner. DoorDash is what Daniel describes as a “last-mile logistics provider” focusing on food delivery. It’s delightful to have a city’s worth of restaurants at your fingertips to be delivered directly to your door. What you may not think about when ordering is the fact that there’s a supply operations team at DoorDash making sure enough drivers are working and other operational needs are met so that DoorDash users can get their orders on time. Daniel is a part of that team.
“We work on a lot of forecasting and planning to make sure that we meet our quality metrics,” he said. The work he does ensures that, after you place your DoorDash order, things run smoothly and you get whatever food you desire delivered to you on time.
Daniel is a Strategy and Operations Associate at DoorDash in Chicago, Illinois. He obtained an undergraduate degree and a Master’s in Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) at the University of Michigan, graduating in 2014. He spent the summer of 2013 working as a research assistant here at the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety (CHEPS).
His experiences in CHEPS and IOE taught him many skills he utilizes in his current position. “What I enjoy most [about my work at DoorDash] is that I get to do a lot of data analysis and I get to be very creative,” Daniel said. “I get to use a lot of things I learned in IOE and especially in CHEPS. I get to take the things I learned to get valuable insight from the data and then come up with a creative solution to improve our operations.”
He may not be working in healthcare but, to Daniel, the skills he developed while working at CHEPS remain invaluable. “At CHEPS we did healthcare but a lot of the things I learned at CHEPS, if you think about why we were doing it or why we picked a certain analysis, I can apply that to last-mile logistics. So I think if I were to give current students advice, it would be to stop every once in a while and think about why you’re learning what you’re learning and think of maybe a few examples in the real world where you could use that. Especially at CHEPS or in IOE, it’s really important to think about the why. It can be easy when you’re busy to just learn the material to learn the material. But I think it’s really important to look at why you’re learning it and how it can be useful or applied in different scenarios.”
Daniel said he’s amazed at how CHEPS has grown since 2013 when he was a student working at the Center. “Whenever I email Amy [Cohn, CHEPS Associate Director], I ask her how many people are at CHEPS. When I was there, we had a few projects going and maybe 10 to 12 people, tops. So it was very small compared to what it is now.”
It may have been smaller then, but CHEPS was a valuable learning experience and offered a sense of fun and family, just as it does for students today. “My time at CHEPS actually prepared me pretty well for this job in that everyone was doing their own projects and everyone was really fun to work with and really fun to learn from,” he said. “So I think the best part about CHEPS is that everyone is doing something interesting that you could get involved in and that you could also learn from so it was pretty easy to just go talk to someone about your project. And they’d be interested to hear and value your insight. Also, you could come away with something that might help your project. So I think it was cool how all of the projects could be interconnected that way.”
From all of us at CHEPS, best wishes for a happy holiday season and a wonderful 2019!
- Mehmet A. Begen Delivers Seminar “Home Healthcare Scheduling: Applications and Challenges,” 12/10/18
- Brian George Delivers Seminar “Does Surgical Training Need to be Re-engineered?”, 12/3/18
- CHEPS Alumnus Luke Stumpos Returns to CHEPS to Share Experiences as a Traveling Consultant, 11/30/18
- Celebrating CHEPSgiving, 11/29/18
- Paula Anne Newman-Casey Delivers Seminar “The Intelligent Glaucoma Clinic: A passive RFID Time Study System to Optimize Patient Wait Times”, 11/26/18
- Ruiwei Jiang Delivers Seminar “Nurse Staffing under Absenteeism: A Distributionally Robust Optimization Approach”, 11/19/18
Karmel is pictured at the top of one of the Al-Salt mountains in west-central Jordan.
See more Where in the World is CHEPS on our webpage.
Center for Healthcare Engineering & Patient Safety | University of Michigan
[email protected] | cheps.engin.umich.edu
