Francisco Zenteno Smith
Applied Operations Research & Software Engineering

Decision-support systems with professional engineering standards

I'm Francisco Zenteno Smith, an operations research scientist with a decade of experience building decision-support software in the industry.

Francisco Zenteno Smith

I can:

  • Deliver end-to-end decision-support software.
  • Modernize legacy systems into production-grade platforms.
  • Lead and train data scientists to build systems with professional engineering standards.

As a result of these efforts, I created SEFOP, a Software Engineering Framework for Optimization Programs.

Decision-support systems SEFOP Experience Speaking Contact
What is a decision-support system?

A decision-support system (DSS) is a software that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. A DSS can help in operational, tactical, and strategic decisions. A DSS is typically executed at some frequency, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. Some examples problems that can be solved with a DSS include:

  • Planning the annual extraction of resources from a mine.
  • Scheduling the monthly shift schedules of a retail store.
  • Planning the weekly delivery of cargo across a network.
  • Recovering the daily operation from a weather disruption in an airline.

A DSS is not a one-off research project, but a system that needs to be developed, maintained, and improved with modern and professional engineering practices as any other software system to maximize its business value. Some of these practices include:

  • Version control
  • Software design & architecture
  • Automated testing
  • DevOps

SEFOP

SEFOP (Software Engineering Framework for Optimization) gives engineering managers four foundations, tailored specifically for decision-support systems, to maximize the business value of their operations research teams: Teach the software-engineering practices these systems demand, Deliver professional software, Lead developers and scientists, and Go Agentic to benefit from agentic development.

Teach
Deliver
Lead
Go Agentic
Go to SEFOP
Experience
2025 - Present
Senior Operations Research Scientist
American Airlines

Leading American's baggage-optimization portfolio, the full suite of optimization solutions across baggage operations.

Drove a 4x increase in the science team's delivery productivity by leading its adoption of agentic and software-engineering practices.

2024 - 2025
Operations Research Scientist
American Airlines

Led the year-long refactor of a legacy decision-support system, cutting technical debt 67% by teaching the team software-engineering principles.

Designed a framework that cut experimentation runtime 93% and raised optimization models' unit-test coverage to 95%.

2017 - 2020
Senior Data Scientist
SMU

Led and mentored a team of 3 data scientists across forecasting, operational efficiency, and workforce scheduling.

Built a simulated-annealing metaheuristic that shipped a monthly cashier-scheduling system to production for 350 stores, without commercial optimization software.

2013 - 2016
Data Scientist
Shift Workforce Management

Designed a multi-objective staff-planning model reused across 20+ consultancies for enterprise clients.

Deployed new production features into a large-scale optimization model for enterprise clients across Latin America.

Speaking
Contact

Reach out to me on LinkedIn, or drop me an email.

Connect on LinkedIn zenteno.fco@gmail.com