WHAT CAN O.R. DO FOR YOU?

The Operational Research Value Proposition

O.R. consistently delivers significant value – strategic to tactical, top-line to bottom-line – to the organisations and executives who use it. Organisations worldwide in business, the military, health care, and the public sector are realising powerful benefits from O.R., including:

• Business insight Providing quantitative and business insight into complex problems
• Business performance Improving business performance by embedding model-driven intelligence into an organisation’s information systems to improve decision making
• Cost reduction Finding new opportunities to decrease cost or investment
• Decision making Assessing the likely outcomes of decision alternatives and uncovering better alternatives
• Forecasting Providing a better basis for more accurate forecasting and planning
• Improved scheduling Efficiently scheduling staff, equipment, events, and more
• Planning Applying quantitative techniques to support operations, tactical planning, and strategic planning
• Pricing Dynamically pricing products and services
• Productivity Helping organisations find ways to make processes and people more productive
• Profits Increasing revenue or return on investment; increasing market share
• Quality Improving quality as well as quantifying and balancing qualitative considerations
• Recovery Gaining greater control and
  achieving turn-around
• Resources Gaining greater utilisation from limited equipment, facilities, money, and personnel
• Risk Measuring risk quantitatively and uncovering factors critical to managing and reducing risk
• Throughput Increasing speed or throughput and decreasing delays

Answering the challenges you face today
Organisations and the world in which they operate continue to become more complex. Huge numbers of choices and relentless time pressures and margin pressures make the decisions you face more daunting and more difficult. Meanwhile, new enterprise applications and software are generating massive amounts of data – and it can seem like an overwhelming task to turn that data into insight and answers.

But all that data and the availability of more and cheaper computing power are creating an important opportunity for decision makers – one O.R. is ideally designed to help you take advantage of. O.R. professionals thrive on challenges that involve large numbers of variables, complex systems, and significant risks.

As a result, O.R. can help today’s executives with many of the specific challenges they face, such as:

• Deciding where to invest capital in order to grow
• Getting more value out of ERP, CRM, and other software systems
• Figuring out the best way to run a call centre
• Locating a warehouse or depot to deliver materials over shorter distances at reduced cost
• Forecasting sales for a new kind of product that has never been marketed before
• Solving complex scheduling problems
• Planning for a potential terrorist attack
• Deciding when to discount, and how much
• Getting more cycles out of manufacturing equipment
• Optimising a portfolio of investments, whether it contains financial securities or pharmaceutical product inventory
• Deciding how large a budget to devote to Internet v traditional sales
• Planting crops in the face of uncertainty about weather and consumer demand
• Speeding up response time, whether selling a product or responding to a 999 call

For dozens of O.R. cases that you can search by industry, functional area, and benefit, go to Success Stories.