Team Members

phone: (989) 774-1850
email: tim.pletcher@cmich.edu

Tim Pletcher is the director of applied research at Business Insight where he directs business intelligence and data mining projects in concert with faculty experts. His work includes supporting companies like General Motors, Dow Chemical, Proctor and Gamble, International Paper, Eli Lilly, EDS, Henry Ford Health System and many others. Tim also shares an appointment with The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow College of Health Professions at Central Michigan University where he is the director of information technology.

Before joining Business Insight, he was the chief technology officer at a startup corporation in New York City specializing in electronic commerce and customized supply chain automation. Tim also worked for more than a decade at the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS) as the director for advanced technology and business information systems, where he supported a number of multi-million dollar reengineering projects such as conversion to a single patient statement, workflow automation, electronic data interchange, cost accounting, charge capture, as well as a series of enterprise networking and tele-health initiatives. In 2000, his team at UMHS received a Smithsonian-Computer World Medal for the Medical Readiness Trainer Project using virtual reality and computer based modeling and simulation to reduce medical errors.

Tim earned a BS from the University of Michigan in 1989, and an MS from Central Michigan University in 2007.

phone: (989) 245-5971
email: james.mentele@cmich.edu

Jim Mentele is a senior research fellow at Business Insight with extensive background in data, text, and geo-mining. His responsibilities include working with clients to define business problems, help identify related data, and outline methods to model the appropriate system for solutions.

He has presented and co-authored a number of papers at SAS Users Group forums and INFORMS since 2001 when he began working with Business Insight. Before that, Jim was a senior information scientist at Dow Corning, retiring after 35 years. At Dow Corning, Jim was responsible for global IT applications and database architecture, the Language Translation Capability Center, using structure-property relationship modeling for materials & process design, and using structured innovation methods for opportunity analysis.

Jim has published 37 research reports and several peer-reviewed articles; he has presented numerous papers to SAP Global Systems conferences, American and European SAP Users Groups, Invention Machines Users groups, and Localization Industry Standards Association.

Jim received his BS in mathematics and MS in physics South Dakota State University.

phone: (734) 717-6618
email: phil@tuchinsky.org

Dr. Phil Tuchinsky is an applied mathematician, active in business intelligence and related education projects.

Upon retiring in 2007 from a 28-year career at Ford Motor Company in research & advanced engineering, he established a consulting practice as owner of Tuchinsky BI, LLC and accepted the position of senior research fellow with Business Insight. In the final decade of a varied Ford Motor Company career, Phil helped create the company's first data mining group within a larger business intelligence effort (which Ford calls systems analytics). This organization, today about twenty strong, functions as a consulting group serving company operations. The business intelligence practice proved very successful, grew steadily over the decade and gained a reputation that extends to senior executives in and beyond the company. In this context, he created a productive warranty analysis practice. He was awarded Henry Ford Technology Awards in 1985 and 2000.

Phil's career record includes hundreds of internal and external publications and presentations. While at Ford, Phil worked with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and several Michigan universities, encouraging the use of analytic technologies by creating conferences and other events.

Since 2002, professional master's-level education in the sciences has been an important personal and professional interest that complements his business intelligence career. Phil serves as an industrial advisor to the professional science master's (PSM) degree program in industrial mathematics at Michigan State University. He has spoken by invitation about the business significance of PSM degrees and the value of hiring PSM graduates in many forums. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Council of Graduate Schools PSM program and is a member of the National Research Council study committee on Enhancing the Master's Degree in the Natural Sciences (report in press). He is also participating in the development of a pioneering PSM degree program at the University of Michigan: the world's first MS in Applied Complex Systems.

Phil won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate study as he completed the mathematics and physics programs at Queens College, CUNY in 1966. He completed his MS and PhD degrees at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, in 1968 and 1971.

phone: (989) 774-1622
email: joe.czyzyk@cmich.edu

Dr. Joe Czyzyk joined Business Insight in July 2006, as a business intelligence analyst. He supports the capture, collection, exploratory data analysis, and transformation of complex data sets for incorporation into various software programs including SAS Enterprise Miner, IBM Intelligence Miner, and ESRI Geographic Information Systems. He also manages projects under the supervision of one of the Business Insight research fellows. And he coordinates and assists research committee meetings and business insight seminars.

Before joining Business Insight, Joe worked as a post-doctoral appointee in mathematics and computer science at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. He then spent several years as a volunteer English teacher in Poland and subsequently owned his own private English teaching company for two years following his volunteer work. He is a well noted author of several publications and has received honorable mention for the triennial Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming 2000 for his publications for work on the NEOS Server. He was awarded a three-year computational research graduate fellowship grant from the US Department of Energy.

Joe completed his undergraduate work at Wheaton College where he obtained a BS in Mathematics. He obtained his MS in applied mathematics/ engineering science, followed by a PhD in industrial engineering/ management science from Northwestern University.

phone: (989) 774-1025
email: lyubov.fishman@cmich.edu

Luba Fishman's current role at Business Insight supports the capture, collection, exploratory data analysis, and transformation of complex data sets for incorporation into various software programs including SAS Enterprise Data Miner, IBM Intelligent Miner, and ESRI Geographic Information Systems.

She received her BS in Mathematics from Kazan State University, in Kazan, Russia. While pursuing her bachelor's degree, she worked as a researcher, conducting complex analysis at the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics. For several years following the completion of her BS, Luba taught high school physics and mathematics in Kazan, Russia. She then moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she completed her MA in Applied Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh. While working toward her MA, Luba worked as both a teaching assistant in the department of statistics, as well as a statistical consultant at the Center of Statistics.

phone: (517) 214-5165
email: tang1c@cmich.edu

Shar Tang has served as a business intelligence analyst with Business Insight for more than four years and, as a project leader, has managed more than a dozen projects related to various industrial fields.

She has rich experiences in data mining, text mining, geographic information system, and utilizing them together in one project. In 2004, she led the Business Insight team in the KDD (knowledge discovery and data mining) Cup competition. She is also involved in developing and teaching business intelligence courses at CMU.

Shar received her BS in Artificial Intelligent Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China, and her MS in computer science from Central Michigan University.

phone: (734) 837-0279
email: tracy.hewitt@cmich.edu

Before joining Business Insight in 2008, Tracy was the senior consultant and owner of Irwin Hewitt Consulting in Plymouth, Michigan. She worked with clients to implement industry-specific best practices and data-driven decision making. She led, and worked as a team member on, many successful projects for hospitals within the Detroit Medical Center.

Tracy is also a recognized community leader and has actively served on the planning commission and the zoning board of appeals for the city of Plymouth for more than seven years. She started her career working in Washington, DC—first an economist and later as the executive director of a national science organization. In this capacity, she was an invited speaker before the National Academy of Sciences on two occasions. She also advised members of Congress and the presidential administration through testimony, meetings, and formal speeches. She has written a number of publications on topics related to agricultural economics and national science policy.

Tracy earned a BA in economics from the Honor's College at Michigan State University (1988) and a MS in applied economics from the College of Agriculture at Michigan State University (1992).

phone: (989) 774-4304
email: audra.buchanan@cmich.edu

Audra received a BAA from CMU in design/graphic design and began her career locally as a designer and later as creative director for CU Marketing, a Mt. Pleasant firm that specialized in marketing materials for credit unions around the country.

Following that, Audra joined the communications department of Dow Corning Corporation as a graphic design specialist, lending her skills and talents to multiple internal and external projects including the annual Tech Conference, the Health and Environmental Safety report, Dows intranet sites, and the redesign of the Dow Corning website. Audra was also part of a team that won a 2001 Golden Quill Award for an outstanding internal communications program that included Dow’s Horizons magazine—a print magazine translated into five languages—and an accompanying website which showcased new products and ongoing projects at Dow Corning. Audra was most recently the office manager for her husband's growing construction business.