/ What is Operations Engineering? /
Operations Engineering is the process of resolving system design and management issues that prevent organizations from achieving peak performance, such as:
- How should we allocate resources and inventory to optimally balance competing objectives of cost, service level, and productivity?
- How can we schedule our production facility, call center, or transportation network to rapidly respond to a changing business environment?
- How do we efficiently mine transactional data and allocate costs to set optimal prices?
- How should we redesign the product or process to achieve optimal quality?
Although these problems appear to be quite different, their solutions are rigorously quantitative and have significant financial impact. For example:
- A leading maker of inkjet printers cannot meet demand. Analytics recommends a production system design that boosts productivity by $280 million.
- An electronics distributor sells its excess warehouse capacity. Analytics quickly analyzes hundreds of millions of transactions and develops a pricing model which increases annual profits by $18 million.
- A charter jet company is losing money. Analytics reduces scheduling time from 3 hours to 5 minutes and improves solution quality, resulting in a 10% reduction in fleet size and a 50% reduction in routing staff.
- A truck manufacturer is experiencing significant defects in a major component. Analytics makes the appropriate product design change recommendations, and defects drop 98%.
- A leading soft-goods distributor is breaking bank covenants. Analytics’ supply-chain modeling allows them to reduce inventories 25% while improving service levels.
Operations Engineering is highly quantitative, interdisciplinary, and results-focused.