About Ben Grannan, Ph.D.: Key Decision Analytics

Background

The Work Comes First

Ben's career has been built around one question: how do organizations make better decisions with the data they already have? That question led to a Ph.D. in analytics and decision science, an active faculty position as a professor of analytics, and published research in peer-reviewed journals spanning business operations, healthcare systems, military logistics, and sports analytics.

Key Decision Analytics was founded to bring that same level of rigor to client organizations. Ben works directly with every client. There are no junior associates and no handoffs. When you engage KDA, you get Ben from the first conversation through final delivery.

KDA handles the analytical and strategic work: data strategy, decision modeling, optimization, and AI roadmapping grounded in operations research rather than surface-level tooling. When a roadmap calls for AI systems to actually be built and deployed, that implementation runs through Ben's second firm, Grannan AI Partners. The two practices split cleanly: KDA decides what to build and proves the case; Grannan AI Partners ships it.

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Credentials

Education

Ph.D. in Analytics and Decision Science

Faculty Role

Professor of Analytics, active faculty

Research

Published in INFORMS, Springer, and SAGE journals

Applied Work

Business operations, healthcare, military logistics, sports analytics

Also Leads

Grannan AI Partners, AI implementation consulting

Published Research

Research that moves practice forward.

INFORMS

Scheduling the Valley Baseball League

Optimizing a complex schedule under dozens of competing constraints, the same class of problem as production scheduling or workforce planning.

Springer Optimization Letters

Locating and Dispatching MEDEVAC Assets

Positioning limited high-value resources to minimize response time, directly analogous to fleet, facility, and inventory placement.

Health Care Management Science

Resource Allocation in Fixed-Input Health Systems

Getting more output from a fixed set of resources, the core question behind most capacity and cost decisions.

Journal of Sports Analytics

Scheduling NFL Games to Reduce Strength of Schedule Variability

Balancing fairness and competing objectives across a large schedule, a multi-objective optimization problem at heart.

How We Work

Our approach

Evidence over intuition

Every recommendation is grounded in data and validated by methodology, not gut feel or industry convention. If the evidence does not support a direction, we say so.

End-to-end engagement

We do not deliver decks and disappear. KDA engagements run from initial assessment through implementation and results measurement. The work is not done until it is working.

Built for your context

Generic frameworks do not solve specific problems. We build custom analytical models calibrated to your organization's data, constraints, and objectives.

Two Practices

Two practices. One clear division of labor.

Ben leads two firms that solve different halves of the same problem. KDA is the strategy and modeling practice: it works out what to build and proves the case before anyone writes production code. Grannan AI Partners is the build shop that ships the systems. Many clients use one. Some use both, in sequence.

You are here

Key Decision Analytics

The strategy and modeling layer. Data strategy, decision modeling, optimization, and AI roadmapping: deciding what to do with your data and quantifying the case before implementation begins.

Implementation

Grannan AI Partners

The build layer. When a roadmap calls for AI systems to be designed, built, and deployed into live operations, Grannan AI Partners does the hands-on implementation.

Visit Grannan AI Partners →

Ben Grannan, Ph.D.