Little bit of a late start for me so I am starting with Geoffrey De Smet from Red Hat talking about constraint planning. He points out that some decisions cannot be easily solved with rules-based approaches – they can be described as decision (and as a DMN decision model in our experience) but not readily [...]
scheduling
IBM’s advanced analytics portfolio contains its descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics products (everything from Cognos to SPSS to optimization and decision management). Within this portfolio is IBM’s decision optimization portfolio that contains the solver technology embedded in many IBM and external products. This demand for decision optimization involves enterprise Operations Research (OR) teams, [...]
IBM has a portfolio of decision optimization products that are integral to their smarter analytics strategy, aimed at both the hard-core optimization experts as well as targeting line of business markets. IBM sees optimization expanding, expanding from the traditional optimization technology market to a more mainstream decision optimization platform with an increasing focus on specific [...]
I got to hear Jim Sinur (@jimsinur)talk about intelligent business operations – what he sees as the future of business process and business rules at Building Business Capability 2012. Jim sees two critical trends – a focus on incremental transformation and a new business/IT gap driven by the business’ focus on business process and IT’s focus [...]
FICO Xpress Optimization Suite is part of the FICO Decision Management tools suite. It can be used in conjunction with various FICO applications too. It is used directly with their Marketing product and is embedded in their Decision Optimizer product that can generate optimal rules for their Originations, Customer Management, Collections and Fraud products. Outside [...]
I recently published a First Look on the open source OpenRules Decision Management System. Along with traditional Business Rules components, OpenRules includes two other important decision management components: Rules Solver for solving optimization problems Rule Learner for predictive analytics. OpenRules Rule Solver is based on Constraint Programming (CP) technology, that is typically used in scheduling, [...]
I have been doing more thinking about optimization recently and thought I should get caught up with the OR (Operations Research) folks at SAS to see what they are doing. They see OR technologies as part of the overall analytics spectrum and feel that anything that improves the rigor of decision making without unduly constraining [...]
I got a quick overview of TOA Technologies recently. TOA Technologies was founded about 5 years ago to solve “the cable guy” problem – customers waiting at home for hours without knowing when the cable guy, or any other appointment, is going to arrive. Their core idea was that they would predict, with a high [...]
Optimization is one of the core technologies for Decision Management and an increasingly important one as the technology grows to handle more operational problems. Dynadec is one of the new players in this space and has what it regards as a game-changing optimization platform (Comet). Their intent is not simply to provide a new optimization [...]
ILOG and XM presented on optimization and business processes. Optimization in this context is about mathematical optimization aimed at decision support or Operations Research. Creating plans and schedules to optimize use of resources. Optimization helps business create best possible schedules or plans, explore their alternatives and understand trade-offs between conflicting goals. For instance, how much [...]
Steve Zannos of NEW Customer Service Companies presented on customer loyalty in an industry with lots of third parties involved. NEW provides service support to companies who sell products and works with 30,000 independent service agents – everything from single technicians to large depots to national networks. They try to drive customer loyalty through this [...]
One of the best things about being at DIALOG was the opportunity to meet a bunch of ILOG customers and learn how they are making better decisions in their organizations. It seems to me that every one of these customers is, in a very practical way, helping to build a smarter planet. The first group [...]
David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]
