Intelligent Enterprise

FOUR SIGNS YOU COULD BENEFIT FROM OPERATIONS RESEARCH

By Mary Crissey

Operations research (OR) is likely to deliver better, higher-confidence decision making if one or more of the following conditions applies:

1. You face complex decisions. Do you face more decision factors than you can handle manually? Do you have competing goals or difficulty weighing the pros and cons involved with multiple criteria? OR professionals can analyze complex situations and build intelligence into software systems.

2. You're having problems with business processes. One or more of your processes are limping along and you aren't sure exactly what to change. Many small, day-to-day decisions are guided by what's typically worked well in the past, and you'd like to incorporate creative improvements. OR can simulate and test proposed changes to your processes before you implement costly revisions.

3. Your organization is not making the most of its data. Do you track information about your organization and have data that is begging to be used? OR specializes in working with unused or underused data, extracting the most valuable information and showing what additional data you could collect to increase the value further.

4. You're troubled by risk. Do you want to limit or reduce risk? Assessing the risk of a new project or contract is often tricky. OR helps you quantify risk, which is critical to controlling it.

Mary Grace Crissey is an analytics marketing manager at SAS and a council officer of INFORMS. Write her at marygrace.crissey@sas.com