In this session, Gurobi Partners AMPL, Nextmv and Ormae, and Frontline Systems will host roundtables where you can bring your questions to get insights and recommendations for your toughest problems.
AMPL Roundtable topic: Streamline & Conquer: How Optimization Boosts Efficiency
In today’s competitive landscape, streamlining operations and maximizing resource efficiency are necessities. This round table, hosted by AMPL Optimization, explores how optimization transforms performance by finding the best solutions to complex problems. Whether it’s cutting costs, improving quality, or enhancing services, optimization empowers data-driven decisions for short- and long-term gains. Join us for a dynamic discussion to share challenges, insights, and explore solutions tailored to your operational needs.
Facilitator: Christian Valente, Senior Software Engineer, AMPL
Nextmv Roundtable topic: Supercharge your growth: How optimization drives top-line revenue
When optimization technology works well it feels magical. But it is not magic. From the modeling framework to the solver, infrastructure, workflows, and people contributing, decision optimization is team sport that involves orchestrating a symphony of moving parts. This means there are opportunities to optimize within optimization technology stacks and teams in order to drive top-line revenue. This roundtable will explore what those opportunities are through different lenses: technology choices, algorithm team dynamics and productivity, solution and results analysis, business stakeholder buy-in, collaboration across disciplines, and more. Bring your questions, observations, and stories of what has or had not worked, and walk away with tangible insights into how to improve your approach going forward.
Facilitators: Carolyn Mooney and Ryan O’Neil from Nextmv
ORMAE Topic: Mitigate Risk, Maximize Results: The Power of Optimization
Many organizations operate in multiple-geographies, and for them, a disruption in one corner of supply-chain can sometime unexpectedly turn into a major risk. For example, their manufacturing may be concentrated at a single location or probably they are dependent upon a single supplier for a critical raw material. In these situations, modelling capabilities of optimization can help them to identify what is the best way of demand fulfilment when the weakest link in their supply chain breaks. Also, modelling multiple scenarios can help organizations identify their weakest links.
Facilitator: Dr. Amit Garg, Founder and CEO, ORMAE
Frontline Systems Topic: Unleashing Cost Savings Through Business Optimization
This Roundtable will focus on applications of optimization that yield measurable cost savings – an outcome that businesses always want to achieve, but that often becomes urgent in case of a recession or industry slowdown.
Besides identifying common applications, found across industries, where cost savings can be realized via optimization, we’ll discuss the kinds of companies and people who are good prospects for an optimization solution. Wherever possible, we’ll aim for concrete use cases and demonstrations, not just abstract ideas, for how we can help customers achieve their goals.
We’ll start with the view that optimization provides better ways to allocate scarce resources to specific uses to reach business goals, subject to a range of constraints. The resources may be money, raw materials, inventory, warehouse space, production time and space, vehicle and equipment time, and often people time. Businesses seek to apply resources to achieve goals – for example meeting demand from customers – doing so at lowest cost. Optimization “shines” when there are far too many possible combinations of resource assignments to “figure out manually”, so an automated method is needed.
Some classic examples we can discuss in this Roundtable include:
- The “transportation problem” (shipping materials or products between facilities), which arises in many industries, where an optimization model can find a set of resource assignments (quantities of goods on routes) that minimizes shipping costs, or shipping and inventory holding costs.
- The “knapsack problem” (loading trucks, ships or containers with items of various sizes) is another problem that arises in many industries and settings. An optimization model can find the most efficient way to load each vehicle, meeting shipment goals and other constraints with the fewest (and hence least costly) number of trucks, ships or containers.
- The “blending problem” (selecting the right amounts of inputs – from crude oil or chemicals to food grains – to yield a mix that meets quantified quality goals at the least possible cost) is a third problem that arises in many industries – from refining oil to feeding farm animals to even blending stocks and bonds in an investment portfolio.
But not all businesses are equally good candidates for a cost-saving optimization model. Large businesses can very often benefit from a small percentage cost savings, because that percentage is applied to millions or even billions of dollars of cost. But for many small businesses where costs are measured in thousands of dollars, the savings achievable from optimization may not justify the cost of software and the user / analyst time and effort to build and test the model. Businesses also vary in their ability to pull together the data needed to drive the optimization model, on a timely basis.
This Roundtable will also seek to address that last problem: How to lower the user / analyst time and effort required to build and test an optimization model, thereby enlarging the available market. We can discuss pre-packaged application solutions and pre-designed models, the use of spreadsheets, high-level modeling languages, and high-level programming language and Internet APIs to lower time and cost. We can also discuss user training programs, the role of higher education, software “wizards”, and modern generative AI tools to speed and simplify the task of building and testing optimization models.
Facilitator: Daniel Fylstra, Founder and CEO, Frontline Systems
