Keep Your Stars in Their Lane through Optimal Resource Allocation! (sponsored)

Imagine you are the swimming coach for the US Olympic team. You have a pool full of great swimmers with endless potential, and you want to come home with as many gold medals as possible. When you are deciding which participants to put on the medley relay, where four strokes are represented and a variety of talents are needed, you wouldn’t just randomly choose four swimmers. Even picking the four best swimmers might not give you the best chance of winning the gold. You would identify your best swimmers and which swimmer performs the best at each particular stroke. You might also consider how well those four swimmers work as a team, how many other races each swimmer is participating in, and which swimmers hold up best under pressure. The team who comes home with the most gold medals not only knows who their best swimmers are but optimally allocates swimmers for each race.

It is not just coaches who use optimization to get optimal results. The field of Operations Research, where mathematical models and advanced analytics are used to identify the most optimal decision, is employed across many fields.  By using advanced analytics, the sales force at NBC reduced rework by over 80% and increased revenue by over $200 million between 1996 and 2000 [1]. Similarly, Motorola changed the way it conducted negotiations with suppliers to an analytics-driven platform with online negotiations and scenario-based optimization analysis in the early 2000s, resulting in a savings of more than $600 million [2].

Accounts Receivable Management is an area prime for operations research. The uses of operations research and advanced analytics in accounts receivable management are numerous, from reducing mail costs to using a score, such as the NLP Logix predictive modeling score, to construct your overall dialer strategy. Today, we will focus on one specific strategy: using advanced analytics to optimize your staffing strategy.