Welcome to The Optimizers
Workplace productivity in the area of connected cars, GPS tracking phones and location-aware apps. It makes us more productive right? Not necessarily so. Consider this. Non-farm labor productivity grew ZERO percent in the 4th Quarter of 2017 according to the BLS (Bureau Productivity and Costs, Fourth Quarter and Annual Averages, 2017). If you drill down a few levels, and talk to business owners and employees you see a similar theme.
Salesforce, who leads the global market for CRM (according to both Gartner and IDC), publishes a report on Sales Productivity every year that paints a similar picture. Sales reps (the most common user of their software) report that they spend 54% of their time doing things other than sales. If you consider a highly compensated Sales Person makes $150,000 USD a year, you’re paying them $156/hr!! (assuming they’re doing their job 46% of the time / 2080 total hours per year). Yikes.
The solution to unlocking business productivity exists as we’ve seen how location-aware smart phones accelerate our productivity at home. Like most consumer innovations it takes some time for those innovations to have an impact in the enterprise. We need to figure out how to leverage the logistical might of an Amazon, FedEx, or Lyft and then apply that into our businesses. Once we do that, the benefits will be endless. Better decisions on how many people we need to sell and service our customers. A more on-demand level of Field Service and warranty repair. A happier customer at the highest level of productivity.
The goal of this publication is to share insights, best practices and examples of how companies are solving 5 fundamental questions for Field Based Work
We’ve assembled a great team of academics studying Optimization and Vehicle Routing Problems and teamed them up with Practitioners deploying that science into their business.
More to come….
