Procurement & Production Planning
Issues & Objectives
- One of world’s largest primary cocoa manufacturer having 60+ plants across the globe
- Procures cocoa beans from across the globe and supplies cocoa butter, liquor and cakes to all large brands across the world
- Objective was to minimize the cost of procuring & storing cocoa beans While ensuring that sales forecasts, and sales orders, as they get confirmed are met
Results
- Reduced stock from 24 months to 7 months while always ensuring at least 3 months’ buffer for procurement time of 1 – 3 months
- Consistently met quality requirements
- Reduced unusable old beans stock to Zero
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Large Cocoa Manufacturer
Industries
Supply Chain & Retail
Location
Singapore
Challenges
- Large number of recipes
- Converting monthly to daily production plan imposes practical limitations
Solution
- Propose the following while meeting quality requirements
- Annual Procurement Plan: minimize cost of produce, transit and holding and meeting sales forecast
- Monthly Production Plan: meet monthly demands of cake, butter, liquor and powder
- Daily Production Plan: meet daily sales demand and ensure maximum utilization of lines
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Market Mix Modeling for Personal Care Brand
Issues & Objectives
- A leading manufacturer of hair care products in Bangladesh wanted to plan marketing campaign and distribution strategy with accurate timing and execution at micro level
- The company needed to achieve this through anticipation and planning for cycles and risks
- Project objective was to develop predictive demand model for its leading brand and one newly launched brand 3.5 months in advance
- The predicted change in consumer demand would enable them to take timely actions
Benefits
- Models predicted future sales with at least 90% accuracy
- Predictions using various scenarios of ad spend and distribution helped the company plan strategy and to be ahead of competition
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Large Trucking Company
Industries
Supply Chain & Retail
Location
US
Challenges
- Collection of macro economic variables from various sites
- Alignment of variables from differing time periods
- Alignment of retail audit and household panel data
Solution
- Forecast macro economic variables using time series models (ARIMA, Holt winter, Exponential smoothing)
- Predict disposable income from macro economic variables
- Forecast category offtake from disposable income and past offtake taking into account seasonality, festival, distribution
- Predict brand sales from category offtake and other controllable factors
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Viewership Optimization
Issues & Objectives
- To schedule content (movies, shows etc.) for linear TV which optimizes viewership balancing content rights, various campaigns, audience fatigue and airing rules.
Benefits
- Can be used for scheduling any content – music, shows (sitcoms) and movies
- Improved content rights utilization
- Improved audience targetting
- Controlled release of content to minimize viewer fatigue
- Strict adherence of airing rules
- Flexibility to plan campaigns based on genre, cast, theme etc
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Leading Broadcasters in India
Industries
Media
Location
India
Solution
- Interface allowing multiple users to collaboratively input campaigns
- Pre-specify certain airings
- Take inputs over APIs or database view for airing rights, viewership history etc
- Provide airing rules, specify primary TGs for timebands
- Generate programming schedule with tags
- Users can prepare multiple competing schedules, run comparisons and decide best schedule well in advance
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Inventory Optimization
Issues & Objectives
- One of world’s largest mining corporation having a network of 9 mines
- Approximately $ 400 million working capital used to manage spares inventory of about 182K SKUs
- Stock position monitored by the MRP system every ½ hour & orders are placed
- Objective was to propose improvement to spares inventory management at each storage location to minimize locked up working capital while meeting SLAs
Benefits
- 20% savings in working capital ~ $ 80 million
- The existing MRP database was updated with new ROP & EOQ
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Largest Mining Corporation
Industries
Supply Chain & Retail
Location
Singapore
Challenges
- Large number of SKUs ~182K
- Demand variations
Solution
- Derived inventory policy at the network level from ROP and EOQ
- Identified 9 different models for distributions of demand volume
- Developed an ML decision tree for choosing appropriate model based on value & velocity
- Computed EOQ using selected model
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Infrastructure Planning – Offshore Drilling
Issues & Objectives
- Long term infrastructure planning – over a 52 year horizon
- Determine the sequence in which sub-sea wells should be drilled to maximize profit
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
–
Industries
Supply Chain & Retail
Location
–
Solution
- Given 140 polygons (indicated by lat/long) which ones should be drilled?
- When should each polygon be drilled?
- Well platforms are needed to support the drilling of wells
- What is the number of well platforms required? What capacity should each have? When should we commission each platform?
- Hydrocarbon flow from wells will be stored and processed at production platforms
- What is the number of production platforms required? What capacity should each have? When should we commission each platform?
- It is necessary to make these choices together and not sequentially
- Number of rigs available
- Number of polygons to be drilled in any period limited by available capacity of well platforms
- Well flow rate in any period limited by available production capacity
- Problem modelled and solved using complex optimization techniques
- Provides a critical strategic planning tool for senior management
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Airline O&D Passenger & Revenue Forecasting
Issues & Objectives
- Forecast passenger and revenue for major O&D (Origin & Destination)/POS (Point of Sale) combinations for a large East African Airline
- Short term O&D forecasts for every flight date up to 90 days in the future to be generated everyday
- Long term rolling forecasts up to 5-10 years to be generated quarterly
Methodology
- Linear Regression
- ARIMA/ARIMAX
- Neural Networks
- Etc.
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Budget Airlines
Industries
Supply Chain & Retail
Location
Africa
Data
Short term forecasts based on:
- Current bookings
- Historical bookings
- Seasonality
- DOW (Day-of-Week)
- Etc.
Long term forecasts based on:
- GDP
- Population growth at origin
- Population growth at destination
- Employment growth at origin
- Employment growth at destination
- Etc.
Solution
- O&D forecasting is very challenging because of the small numbers involved
- Good accuracies obtained
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Ad-Spot Optimizer (ASO)
Issues & Objectives
- Generate in real time (typically a few minutes) the daily spot allocation plan which determines the program/breaks in which each spot will be aired
Benefits
- Maximizes revenue ( 2-4% incremental gain)
- Automates the spot allocation process
- Respects FCT Caps
- All allocation rules such as cap on number of ads for the same brand in a program are satisfied
- Checks that all deal conditions are satisfied while allocating ads
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Leading TV Broadcaster
Industries
Media
Location
India
Solution
Designed and developed a software with following features
- Assured allocation at spot, brand, advertiser, deal level
- Even distribution of spots of different brands, products, clients when the rates are same
- Long term even distribution of spots across day-parts from each deal time-band
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Media Enterprise Revenue Optimization System
Issues & Objectives
- An end to end system to automate and optimize advertisement inventory planning for media resulting in additional revenue gain
- The solution focuses on scheduling of commercials, creation of proposals, planning of ad inventory and post evaluation
Benefits
- Maximizes revenue ( 2-4% incremental gain)
- Suggests profitable deals in real time
- Ensures servicing of deals
- Saves premium inventory for selling at higher price
- Right pricing through visibility of inventory
- Saves time and cost
- Reduces people risk
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Leading Broadcaster in India
Industries
Media
Location
India
Modules
- Proposal Builder – customizes rates and inventory commitment to satisfy advertiser/agency requirements while maximizing broadcaster’s margins. It can take care of both CPRP and ER based deals & simultaneously address the requirements of large advertisers and the scatter market
- Inventory Visualizer – Inventory Visualizer derives insights for sales strategy planning from data. It provides clear visual presentation of current and historical data, insights for right pricing and full visibility of inventory, consumption and availability
- Ad-Spot Optimizer – generates in real time (typically a few minutes) the daily spot allocation plan which determines the program/breaks in which each spot will be aired
- Demand Forecaster – The demand Forecaster forecasts demand from forecasters for day-parts and programs taking into account factors such as booking history, current bookings, channel grp, seasonality, festivals and economic indicators
- Post Eval – tracks the performance of marketing campaigns by mapping spot ratings to as-run logs
- Make Goods – suggests appropriate spots for make good to compensate for dropped ROs or unmet GRP targets while maximizing revenue
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Portfolio Optimization Tool
Portfolio inputs
- Maximize expected return by using optimization heuristics to solve portfolio optimization problems with different measures of risk (Variance, Semi-variance & VaR) and multiple real-world constraints like Budget, Holding size for each asset, Trade limits for each asset, Cardinality, Round lots, Short Sales, Turnover, Beta etc.
Solution
- The portfolio optimization tool is a state-of-the-art tool for portfolio managers to arrive at the most profitable portfolio while meeting all business constraints. It uses the following heuristics to arrive at the optimal profitable portfolio
- Simulated Annealing
- Tabu Search
- Genetic Algorithm
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
Leading Broadcasters in India
Industries
Financial Services
Location
India
Portfolio inputs
- Asset Index
- Score
- Sector & Country Index
- Price
- Initial Investments (Units)
- Trade Limits
- Min-trade
- Min-holding
- Min-holding
- Benchmark-weight
- Beta
Other inputs
- Limits for country indices
- Limit for sector indices
- Covariance matrix and VAR of assets
- Returns of the assets in various historical periods
- Others
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Ad Revenue Optimiser
Issues & Objectives
- Creating advertising proposals is a vital aspect of a broadcaster’s operations, as it centres around persuading advertisers to commit to investing in advertising slots or campaigns on the broadcaster’s platforms. These proposals encompass different rates for different advertisers based on the frequency and quantum of ad bookings
- Ad Revenue Optimiser (ARO) is a web application to automate and optimise advertisement inventory planning for the client resulting in additional revenue gain. The solution focuses on creation of proposals, planning of ad inventory and post evaluation
Project information
Techniques
Mathematical Optimization
Client
One of Leading Broadcasters in Asia
Industries
Media
Location
India
Solution
Designed and developed a software serve clients evolving requirements like
- State of the art inventory visualisation
- Advertising on digital and mobile platforms
- Interactive content
- Comprehensive sales management
Benefits
- Improved inventory pricing
- Improved allocation of inventory
- Improved pipeline visibility
- Sales executives performance tracking
- Negotiations history tracking for future reference
- Improved handling of Make goods
- Streamlined, accurate and faster billing
What we build, how it performs – Explore our work!
Would love to hear your thoughts!