[10] He describes his own work as "research, industrial implementation, software entrepreneurship, investing in start-ups and turnarounds, and creating a social enterprise" that lies "in the intersection of math, money, and morals.

"[11] Tayur's work "has earned him a reputation as someone uniquely talented in identifying, and then solving, novel and timely problems confronting society," according to a 2014 Productions and Operations Management article honoring him.

[19] Tayur founded SmartOps (in 2000) and OrganJet (in 2011), and has consulted for various organizations, including Caterpillar,[4][20] ConAgra Foods,[21] Deere,[22] Flight Options,[21] General Electric,[4] GlaxoSmithKline,[8] Intel,[4] Kellogg's,[21] and Microsoft.

He is recognized for his operations research work in developing novel algorithms for models in stochastic inventory theory (using Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis).

Tayur developed Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) for stochastic inventory models, with a wide number of applications, including managing product variety using vanilla boxes, designing rapid-response supply chains, and omni-channel retailing.

[17] Tayur's work with Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) was featured in the movie Concussion,[31] applies OM methods to improve Medical Examiner Offices.

[34][35] This work attracted the attention of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy[36][37] and was featured at the 24th Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation Annual Meeting in 2016.

His research on geographic disparity, gender inequity and video nudge were discussed at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on "A Fairer and More Equitable, Cost-Effective, and Transparent System of Donor Organ Procurement, Allocation, and Distribution.

[44] In collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Tayur developed machine learning algorithms to predict hospital re-admissions due to sickle-cell disease.

[63] In 2012, Tayur was elected as a fellow of INFORMS for his lifetime achievements in “research on inventories and supply chain management, and developing new methodologies, implementing software in manufacturing, logistics and supply chains, and creating a market for enterprise inventory optimization software.” [64][note 1] In 2017, Tayur was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of MSOM.

In the same year, he was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for "developing and commercializing innovative methods to optimize supply chain systems.

[69] In 2022, he received the Manufacturing & Service Operations Management journal's Best Published Paper Award for his work on combating child labor in global supply chains.

[80] In 2000, Tayur founded the software company SmartOps Corporation, after winning the first prize in the EnterPrize Case Competition that year,[81] and served as its CEO until 2012.

[93][55] Since the founding of OrganJet, Tayur's "entrepreneurial approach to reform [the] organ waiting list" has caught the attention of Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth, among other preeminent economists.

[55][94] In addition, OrganJet has been covered by the AOL/MAKERS initiative[95] and by the media in regions suffering from geographic disparity in waiting times for organ transplants, such as Boston,[96] Denver,[97] and Wisconsin.

[102] Students were asked to write responses to the question "If you were Sridhar Tayur, how do you think about your aspirations to establish OrganJet and GuardianWings, change the current transplant system in America, honor your commitments to Carnegie-Mellon University, and live a full life?"

"[104] On August 7, 2013, it was announced that Irena Bucci, a resident of the Washington D.C. area, successfully received a kidney transplant in Pittsburgh through the service provided by OrganJet.

[105] In June 2014, OrganJet sponsored a “Transplants” campaign with Mediaplanet and USA Today aiming to increase the public's awareness of the importance of organ donation.

[107] A 2014 piece in The Atlantic, "A Private Jet Is Waiting to Take You to Your Kidney Transplant" detailed Tayur's motivation behind founding OrganJet and the company's latest developments.

"[135] PPOMs in product companies (across a variety of industries) include designing rapid response supply chains,[131] optimizing product portfolios,[136] implementing a postponement strategy,[137] planning production with significant changeover times and costs,[138] reducing net landed cost in procurement,[139] optimizing working capital needs to meet service levels,[70] operating a global supply chain using S&OP process,[140] quoting accurate lead times,[141] and designing a seasonal logistics strategy through a gain sharing contract.

[144] Through SmartOps, Tayur has also explored massively parallel versions of enterprise inventory optimization (EIO) algorithms on IBM's Blue Gene.

In 2005, as Blue Gene's first supply chain application,[145] the IBM-SmartOps pilot solved industrial scale problems with more than a million variables in 0.04 seconds on a "half rack" system with 512 processors.

"[167] He is currently developing and supporting research on room-temperature Ising machines with collaborators from IIT Madras and National University of Singapore.

Collaborating with researchers at IIT-Madras, Tayur has studied Unital Qubit (that includes the important case of symmetric Generalized Amplitude Damping) channels and shown that the maximum classical capacity can be achieved without entanglement.

In April 2014, Carnegie Mellon University received a $1 million gift from Tayur and his wife Gunjan Kedia,[174] a Tepper alumna (MSIA ’94).

The film Journey to Normal,[178] featured by The Shriver Report,[179] profiles several female veterans, including Christine Mau, who became the first woman to fly an F-35 Fighter Jet.

[192] In an interview with Variety about the lack of diversity in Disney's C-suite, Tayur advocated for a systematic approach: “Even if there are many talented or capable people, it takes time to sift through and make sure there is some kind of a process, and this is not done haphazardly...

Tayur served on the Board of Overseers and was a Ralph Lowell Society member of WGBH, in which capacity he helped bring organ donation topics to wide public awareness through the PBS-OZY collaboration late-night TV show, Point Taken.

Since 2009, Tayur has funded neuroscience research in Dr. Beverly Davidson's laboratory at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (previously at University of Iowa) that utilizes RNA interference to find therapy for rare genetic disorders like SCA2.

Through SmartOps, Tayur sponsored the 12th Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard Business School,[202] the MIT Sloan Annual Operations Simulation Competition in 2010 and 2011,[203] and the Els for Autism 2011 Golf Challenge.