Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

OPTIMIZATION STAGE

The optimization stage is about deriving and refining the best business action by taking into account multiple factors and business goals against business constraints. The goal of the optimization stage is to single out the best possible action that will lead to the desired outcome from a variety of possible options. As an example, one of the coauthors, JP Isson, worked with a company recently on an optimization challenge. The optimization goal was to increase the acquisition team by 20 people, in order to maximize the sales coverage in the United States. However, the following constraints had to be factored in:

• Create 20 equal basket portfolios to be assigned to new sales representatives.
• Each portfolio should have the same number of companies.
• Each portfolio should have an equal distribution of employee size (high, medium, low).
• Each portfolio should have an equal distribution of company potential (high, medium, low).
• Weighing in time zone and company location (Eastern Time Central Time); companies should be equally distributed across location and zone for each portfolio.
• Service representatives should be equally distributed to support the portfolio.
• Each portfolio should have an equal distribution of industries.

Factoring in and weighing all of the aforementioned constraints and criteria require more than human intuition and experience. Optimization is a technique that leverages mathematics to maximize the results in helping to answer complex business questions. ...