Is it used in any other products? Spend management?Optimization is not used directly used in the Spend management product at the moment. However it uses technology from a closely related area in Computer science, namely Machine learning and data categorization techniques. These technologies employ the mathematical and analytical methods that help to detect patterns and similarities within massive amounts of unstructured data sets.
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Why do I need any advanced technology to come up with these decisions?After all, we do have extremely powerful computers these days; can’t you just write a simple program that will evaluate all these possible operating plans one by one and pick the best?
The reason is that for most business problems the amount of possible outcomes is so enormously huge, that it would take even the best of breed computers a million of years to enumerate them all.
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What benefits does it provide?Optimization provides a number of different benefits, and I would stress the two most important ones.
One of them is the ability to process very large amounts of various data quickly. The number of various possible operational plans could easily be in the order of billions. The best one can hope to evaluate and compare manually or with tools like excel is maybe a dozen of them and ver…
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Where else is it used?While mostly invisible to an unsuspecting observer, OR touches and affects almost every aspect of our lives. From healthcare, to mail delivery, to automotive factories, to all stages of supply chains and the list goes on and on. Essentially, anywhere where there is an operational decision to be made, there is an OR model to be found. And more and more applications of it emerge every day, as people…
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What is the technology that powers sourcing optimization?Optimization is a part of bigger science called Operations Research (OR).
In a nutshell, operations research (O.R.) is the discipline of applying advanced mathematical and analytical methods to help make better decisions. OR roots go back as far as 18th century when there was the first attempts to apply mathematics to plan UK mail operations. Coming back to contem…
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Ask the scientistMy name is Olga Raskina and I am the Lead scientist in Emptoris.
I have been with the company for almost 6 years, developing the innovation and scientific methods that power many of our analytical capabilities. My primary expertise is in the area of Optimization, and in these years I have created and enhanced a large number of features and mathematical engine advancements within Sour…
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