3 ways Biarri Workforce can improve rostering and workforce planning

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The team behind Biarri Workforce are dedicated to helping your business get the most out of our rostering software. Whether it is simplifying the job of your workforce planners or creating a team friendly roster that increases your employees satisfaction and retention, Biarri Workforce is the solution to improve your workforce planning and rostering. Biarri Workforce is tried and tested across many industries including maintenance teams, healthcare and aviation.

Read on to learn about the 3 ways Biarri Workforce improved rostering and workforce planning for the team at CQFMS and how Biarri Workforce can help your Workforce Planners and your Business. 

Reahan McBain – FMS Group

1. Biarri Workforce Software

We’ve all heard it before: 

“It is not the tools we use that make us good, but rather how we employ them”. 

This saying doesn’t always hold true, sometimes simply not having the correct tool for the correct job restricts our ability to perform; so why not start with the right tools for the right job? 

Like so many other businesses, CQFMS managed their workforce and planned their rosters using ever increasingly complex Excel spreadsheets. While Excel is a capable tool, rostering a growing team of people over a 24/7 period all while adhering to EBA and fatigue regulations can quickly become a nightmare of complexity. Through system driven automation and the powerful Biarri Workforce roster optimisation engine, the team at CQFMS were able to significantly reduce roster preparation time, more easily ensure compliance with EBA and fatigue requirements and manage changes to their rosters more effectively. 

2. Onboarding New and Existing Employees

When managing a large fleet of workers, onboarding and assigning new employees to a roster can become a time consuming task. This was the case with CQFMS, with a growing workforce. Previously, onboarding was completed using another HR software system and new employee lists were manually transferred through to Excel to begin planning the roster. This was inefficient and not scalable so CQFMS requested a more streamlined approach to onboarding. Through Biarri Workforce, Workforce Planners are now able to onboard employees much easier, as well as manage their roster in the same system. Found in the Biarri Workforce ‘Employees’ tab, you are able to onboard new employees and upload documents such as certificates and other qualifications all in one simple and easy to use interface. 

3. Creating a safe roster 

CQFMS and Biarri value safety and understand that an implied safety culture goes beyond the job site and includes appropriate roster creation. It is critical when planning a roster to have the correctly trained and skilled people for the job and to ensure that employees have current certification suitable to be rostered to work on a site. Biarri Workforce has in-built validation rules which enforce training and skills compliance to enable workforce planners to plan and roster the correct workers to be deployed on site. Another crucial aspect of roster creation that Biarri Workforce automated for CQFMS was the time consuming process of checking and managing employee fatigue. Ensuring the safety of employees meant making a roster that was compliant with EBA regulations including workplace fatigue rules.  Previously, it was difficult and time consuming for CQFMS to manually update and track overtime and employee hours for a large workforce. The Biarri Workforce rules engine and validation function will not generate a roster which breaks fatigue rules and when manual changes are made to the roster the rostering team is automatically notified if the planned roster breaches any fatigue rules. Rosters cannot be published without the Workforce Planner acknowledging and/or fixing these issues.

The right tool

CQFMS is one of many valued Biarri Workforce users. By stepping away from Excel spreadsheets and adopting Biarri Workforce, CQFMS have made noticeable improvements in how they plan and manage their rosters. Reducing time and effort to generate rosters while also automating the important task of skills and fatigue compliance.

If you would like to know more about how Biarri Workforce can improve your rostering and workforce planning or have any other further questions, feel free to leave your details below and a team member will get in touch with you. 

Workforce Contact Form

Creating team friendly rosters and the benefits for everyone

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Introduction

Creating rosters can be a complex task.  This is especially the case for difficult large workforces with a range of  employee preferences, combinations of full time, part time and casual team members, the need to adhere with EBA rules, fatigue, skills and competence requirements , meeting or exceeding customer service levels while always operating efficiently and controlling costs.  Clearly, producing a ‘good’ roster is more than making sure there is the right number of staff for the right amount of work. 

So, on top of all of this what does a team friendly roster look like and what are the benefits to employers and employees? 

A Friendly Roster

An example of what makes a team friendly roster.

Sarah is the Workforce Planner for the local hospital Emergency Department. She is tasked with organising and preparing the Doctors rosters which she does a month in advance for a 2 week working period. The roster parameters require each Doctor to work a specific amount of ‘unsocial’ hours covering morning, afternoon and night shifts.  Sarah always  does her best to consider the Doctors preferences for specific days off some of which are always the case and some are new requests each period for example to get a mid week night away to see Hamilton in Sydney or an afternoon off for the school swimming carnival.  

Sarah completes the roster by hand creating a compliant roster with all shifts covered and accommodating as many preferences as possible in as fair a manner as she can. However, is it always a ‘good’ roster from everyone’s perspective?

While a ‘good’ roster will vary from business to business and even with respect to  each employee depending on their individual circumstance, one aspect of ‘good’ roster from an employee perspective can be defined as being fair and equitable – team friendly. For example, while Sarah may have created a functional roster that ensures the ED department meets the service level requirements, Dr Brown might have worked the past 4 Saturdays in some capacity impacting on his ability to watch his children’s sports while another team member may have worked an equal amount of hours but more night shifts than other team members.  Although on the surface the roster was compliant and functional, it is not considered a team friendly roster given the unfairness and lack of equality amongst employees. 

In addition, there may be team members who prefer to work weekends, others who prefer nights, some who only work 3 days a week and still others who might be spouses and who cannot work at the same times as their partners – so that someone is home with junior.  

Further, the roster needs to consider patterns of work – moving from morning to afternoon and onto night shifts with then a number of days break.

This gets complex quickly!

A team friendly roster will consider all of these different preferences and requirements and provide shifts which are equitable and fair in providing each team member with the same proportion of night or weekend shifts (unless of course they prefer these) and evenly meets as many of their time off requests as possible.

Benefits

Adopting a team friendly roster has many  benefits to both employees and employers. These include:

Better work-life balance 

Your workforce will be made up of a range of different people with different interests and commitments outside of work. Commitments such as family, study, and sport for example. A study conducted by Gallup Reports found that 53% of employees said that an improved work-life balance was important to them. With a fair and equitable roster these other commitments and interests will be accommodated to the fullest extent possible, making work rosters more manageable and providing employees enjoy an improved work-life balance. 

Staff retention 

Improve staff retention with a balanced roster that is considerate of staff preferences and importantly fair and equitable across the team. There are many factors that contribute to employees leaving, such as career advancement, pay and benefits but also the nature of the rosters they are repeatedly asked to work. Employees have shown to be happier when they are able to balance both work and life commitments and are treated fairly  resulting in employees desire to stay in that job. This is especially important when retaining skilled staff or staff with experience that is hard to come by. By ensuring rosters are fair and equitable across all employees you will reduce conflict and ensure no employees feel stuck with the ‘unsocial’ shifts. 

Biarri Workforce provides open and flexible rules and preference capture functionality so hard or soft constraints and preferences can be considered in the roster creation and the powerful roster optimisation engine in Biarri Workforce allows the Sarah the workforce planner to set the roster objectives and generate team friendly rosters automatically in a matter of minutes.

By using Biarri Workforce, you will be able to improve work-life balance for your team members and ensure your roster is fair and equitable. 

Speak with a consultant today and see how Biarri Workforce can improve the way your business coordinates your human workforce. Whether you are currently rostering manually or looking for a more accommodating solution, the team behind Biarri Workforce are dedicated to making Biarri Workforce work for you. 

Workforce Contact Form

Sales forecasting tool

Sales Forecasting Tool to Plan Accurately With Some Simple AI

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Throughout my career I’ve worked with salespeople, as a salesman, and in roles supporting sales activities. Sales is one of the most important functions of a business as without sales, you have no business, no matter how great your product or service is. 

Sales is the fuel for any business to survive and thrive and this makes planning and forecasting sales one of the most important activities a business does.

That’s why running a business without effective and accurate sales forecasting is a bit like flying a plane without a fuel gauge. Of course, an accurate fuel gauge is not necessary or sufficient for generating or maintaining lift – the Wright brothers got away without one. But there’s a reason why modern planes have them – it gives pilots access to data to make the flight decisions to get from A to B. 

So how are you flying your venture?

Probably the same as most other businesses. 

You gather your sales team and ask them, ”how many sales will we have this year?” 

In the best case scenario, they review last year’s sales and make a guess based on gut feeling and intuition (which is not always wrong). 

Commonly enough though, a misalignment of incentives and company sales culture can manifest as a mismatch between targets (optimised for remuneration incentives) and forecasts (optimised for accuracy).

We can do better. 

And to do this we need to use data. But why is data so important?

According to the Professor of Digital Practice at QUT, Mal Thatcher, the 21st century will be the century where,

“By the middle of the century the only tangible asset on an organisation’s balance sheet will be data”

and this is true for your sales too.

To give you and your business a competitive advantage, we at Biarri have developed a simple, easy-to-use Excel sales forecasting tool for you. So it is time to become data driven now and with Biarri’s new tool this is extremely easy. 

Biarri has taken some basic AI techniques and put them into a spreadsheet that requires no macros, no plugins and nothing to install. The AI techniques in this Excel tool will help guide your sales team to make more accurate predictions for the coming year. 

You don’t need to be an expert in AI to leverage the tool. It does all of the hard work for you and provides you with data driven monthly predictions for the coming year based on quarterly sales patterns. You don’t need to know cutting edge AI to use the tool, just how to copy and base a small amount of data.

You can download the tool below for free. There is no need to leave your email address or anything. Biarri’s mission is to make the world more efficient via better decisions powered with mathematics and we believe this tool has the potential to make a difference for your organisation.

Your New Sales Forecasting Tool

Before you download the tool, it is worthwhile telling you what it is, and how to use it.

It uses historic data to establish a pattern and then extrapolates this pattern to be able to predict the coming year’s sales. 

Not only does the tool provide monthly predictions, it also takes into account quarterly sales cycles. Forecasting quarter-by-quarter aligns it with typical quarterly reporting and also captures the variance in quarterly sales. This quarter-by-quarter approach is designed for industries like retail which have some quarters with greater sales (e.g. Xmas). 

There is also a “bad month flag”. This allows users to indicate if something bad has happened in the past during months (e.g. COVID) and if similar events are predicted to occur in the future (in the PREDICTIONS tab). 

This spreadsheet comes prefilled with data to show you what it should look like. To use it for yourself, remove the data from the Monthly Sales column in the Data tab and replace it with your own data. The calculations and updates will be carried out automatically. All other cells are locked for your safety. 

How do I use the sales forecasting tool?

The steps to using the sales forecasting tool are as follows:

1. Collect exactly 36 months of contiguous sales data leading up to the month you would like to predict from. E.g. if you want to predict the yearly sales from January 2022 until December 2022, then collect the 36 months of sales data from January 2019 until December 2021. The model is set up for exactly 36 months of data, not more or less.

2. Copy this sales data into the Monthly Sales column in the Data tab (in green). The top most entry should be the oldest (e.g. in the example in 1., January 2019) and the bottom most entry should be the newest (e.g. December 2021 in the example in 1.).

Sales forecasting tool monthly sales column

3. In the Data tab now enter the first month for the monthly sales data in the month tab by choosing from the drop down menu (this cell is green). Also choose the year in the year column from the drop down menu (this cell is also in green).

Sales forecasting tool month selection

4. For each month, choose whether a bad event occurred (or not) by selecting Yes or No in the Bad Event column. If normal trading and fluctuations were occuring, then put No. Otherwise, if something truly unusual (e.g. COVID) occurred that significantly impacted your sales volumes, select Yes on the months which were affected by this (this column is coloured green).

Sales forecasting tool bad event input column

5. Once this data has been entered, go to the Model Analysis tab to see the outputs of the model. In the Predictions tab, if you predict that there will be any bad months in the future, select Yes in the corresponding months in the Bad Event column (which is in green). For this to have effect, similar Bad Events need to have occurred in the past otherwise this will have no effect.

Bad event output column

6. Finally, your predictions are shown in a graph in the Dashboard tab, with a table showing the cumulative results for each quarter.

Monthly sales prediction graph

Download the sales forecasting tool by clicking on the button below.

Download the Excel Sheet Now

What does Biarri do?

Most companies begin with Excel sheets like the one provided here to start making once off decisions on key parts of their business. It is like the first flight of a plane with an often inaccurate fuel gauge caused by data issues. At some point, organisations need to lift up from Excel to correct, secure, easy to use and more powerful tools and this is where Biarri helps.

Biarri’s main value proposition is to help clients realise operational excellence in the way they run their business via AI. The core of this is excellent, data driven decision making. Biarri catalyses AI driven business decisions by using its cloud based set of mathematical tools, the Workbench.

To discuss how you can leverage your data and turn it into value to reach new operational heights, reach out with the form below now.

Get in touch

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Healthcare Solutions Thumbnail

The Biarri Score: Predictive Analytics for better integrated healthcare

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Many Health and Hospital services around the world have introduced integrated care activities to coordinate Primary (Community and GPs) and Secondary (Hospitals) care levels in order to increase the effectiveness of care being provided at all levels. 

Biarri delivered a predictive data analytics solution which successfully identified hospital patients in the community who were most likely to readmit to hospitals. Statistical analysis proved the Biarri Solution is able to identify the top 1% of the population at risk of hospitalisation with 90% accuracy.

In January 2018, Ron Calvert, the CEO of Gold Coast Health and Hospital Services (GCHHS) was in the news recognising Biarri’s predictive analytics in the form of a ‘Biarri Score’, which predicts an individual’s likelihood of readmission to hospital with ‘remarkable levels of accuracy’. Check out the article here.

The Biarri Score is now in place in the Gold Coast University Hospital emergency department. Also, patient criticality scores are integrated into local GP practices to provide intra-facility collaboration of healthcare services and prevent unnecessary admissions.

This application of Commercial Mathematics has resulted in increasingly better identification of patient who are likely to readmit, in order to improve the effectiveness of the Integrated Care activities and reduce demand on emergency departments.

 

Get in touch to learn more about Biarri’s Predictive Analytics capability or to learn more about applicaitons of Commercial Mathematics in other areas!

Mitigation by Iteration

Mitigation by Iteration – Facilitating the Optimisation Journey

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For companies to remain competitive, they require smart systems that solve their unique day to day business problems. However, when applying these systems many decision makers get lost in the complexity due to limited communication and collaboration within the implementation process.

We are at the cutting edge of the latest optimisation methodologies and web technologies. However, unlike many other optimisation, and analytics companies out there, one of our main goals is to make powerful optimisation accessible in the real world to bring value to our clients.

We specialise in the development of web applications and smart optimisation engines– delivered in less time than you would probably think. It’s not unusual for us to go from an initial workshop with a client, to understanding their problem, and then having a fully functional optimiser in a production environment within three months.

On top of this the same people are often involved through the entire SDLC (software development life cycle) i.e. from the spec/design, theory, implementation and delivery/support. This reduces the overhead many organisations incur by having different people in business analytics and developer positions. The people implementing the solution actually understand and work with you to solve your problem.

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Driving efficiency in the Oil and Gas industry

Driving efficiency in the Oil and Gas industry

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The oil and gas industry has been under severe pressure since late 2014 when oil prices dropped significantly. The highly volatile international market and oversupply of oil has meant companies have had to reduce costs in one way shape or form.

Bill Kroger, co-chair of law firm Baker Botts told Rigzone in an interview that, “Energy companies may need to lower their prices in response to a drop in demand …. For this reason, we may see CAPEX [capital expenditures] begin to decline until there is some stability with oil prices,”

This has been evident in Australia where many oil and gas companies have reduced capital spending significantly. However, with a lot of oil and gas projects shifting towards the operational phase, how can we make processes and decisions more efficient and effective?

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Health Analytics

Analytics, just what the doctor ordered

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Can Analytics and Optimisation be ‘Just what the Doctor ordered’ for struggling Australian Hospitals and Health Services?

In Australia consumers have more access to information than ever before and are demanding increasing accountability from their doctors, nurses health plans and, better health care quality. The Hospital and Health Services (HHS) industry despite struggling under the weight of an ageing population, a shortage in doctors and nurses, increased regulation, accountability, governance and budgetary oversight, are continually required to provide more with less.

The healthcare industry requires smarter, more informed decisions to enable improved efficiency, better service delivery and enhanced patient outcomes.

Research in 2012 by IBM into the Healthcare Industry in the US confirmed mounting evidence of entrenched inefficiencies and sub-optimal clinical outcomes. The report highlighted how building an analytics focus can help these Health organisations harness “big data” to create actionable insights, set their future vision, improve outcomes and reduce time to value.

The authors note that the abundance of data that bombards healthcare professionals both facilitates and complicates the ability of healthcare providers to achieve and influence desirable outcomes. It appears clear that entrenched systemic inefficiencies in the health systems are at least in part attributed to the ineffective gathering, sharing and use of information

The glut of information makes it hard to differentiate data which can be used to generate powerful insights, from clutter. In fact, the dilemma presented by too much data and too little insight – is cited in the research as an increasingly daunting obstacle standing in the way of better service delivery and improved patient outcomes.

The daunting challenges facing the healthcare industry today make for compelling arguments to expand the role of analytics

The study confirmed that analytics can provide the mechanism to sort through this mountain of complexity and data, and help healthcare organizations deliver on efficiency improvements and better patient outcomes. In Australia the introduction of Activity Based Funding (ABF) has promoted the use of data as the essential input informing critical decisions by Managers, Administrators and Clinicians. Not surprisingly HHS are increasingly looking to move from data processing to data analysis and applying insights to financial outcomes. Australian HHS are just starting to recognise how the power of mathematics through analytics and optimisation can be utilised to consume, unlock and apply new insights from information.

Analytics can provide the mechanism to sort through this mountain of complexity and data

Despite the availability of new methods of analytics that can be used to drive clinical and operational improvements, Australian HHS continue to function with a traditional baseline of transaction monitoring using basic reporting tools, spreadsheets and application reporting. As in the US Health system Australian HHS must face-up to the challenge to move from the traditional model to one that incorporates predictive analytics and enables organizations to “see the future,” and create more personalised healthcare and predict patient behavior.

Advanced analytics and optimisation approaches can take full advantage of the ‘Data deluge’ to generate powerful insights which deliver better outcomes

Today, most HHS use some form of descriptive analytics. They are typically using reporting tools and applications descriptively to understand what has happened in the past and to classify and categorize historical data. However, as their analytics expectations mature, HHS are looking more toward predictive analytics techniques, which take an understanding of the past to predict future activities and model scenarios using simulation and forecasting. The report notes that Enterprise analytics, evidence-based medicine and clinical outcome analytics can all be supported by these more advanced capabilities. For example, analytics can enable the compilation of information about trends, patterns, deviations, anomalies and relationships and reveal key insights.Biarri Optimisation Software Banner

Some Hospital and Health Services are taking a proactive approach

Gold Coast University Hospital (GCUH) is one example of an Australian HHS organisation leading the way by embracing predictive analytics to improve demand for better service delivery and enhanced patient outcomes. Most recently Biarri Optimisation worked with GCUH to enhance their understanding of expected future demand and to develop insight into opportunities to better allocate resources. Through the application of customised predictive analytics and optimisation GCUH improved their knowledge of forecasted demands for the next Financial Year, allowing improved capacity planning requirements for physical resources and staffing resources equating to better workforce optimisation.

Biarri and GCUH demonstrated the value of quantitative analysis in forecasting patient admissions and QWAUs and used this to provide more efficient capacity and resource planning.

For most organisations today, data visualisation, historic trend analysis and forecasting, and standardized reporting are the analytics elements that provide the most value. However, that is likely to change. The research showed that while data visualisation will always be a critical element, increased emphasis will be placed on simulations and scenario development and analytics that are applied within various business processes.

Biarri Commercial Mathematics

To learn more about how Biarri can help your HHS organisation benefit from advanced analytics and optimisation go to www.biarri.com or contact

Sam Rowse: Email: sam.rowse@biarri.com, Mobile: +61 458 004 220

Coal Train Crew Scheduling

An optimised approach to Coal Train Crew Scheduling

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Rail is frequently used for moving coal between mines and ports, and interactions between train and crewing requirements can create highly complex problems.

Recently Matt Herbert, an optimisation consultant at Biarri Commercial Mathematics was invited to present an approach to Coal Train Crew Scheduling at the Queensland University of Technology, hosted by ASOR.

Matt provided insights into the problems many mining and rail companies face when scheduling their crews. His formulation considered many aspects of the real world problem, including restricting the number of crew changes on each service, and variable start times for crews.

This approach is able to produce weekly crew assignments with high utilisation in run times of around an hour, down from existing manual methods requiring a day or more.

Have a look at Matt’s Presentation

On The Blog

Is your decision making based on Analytics or Gut feeling?

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Despite the proliferation of data and the constant drive to adopt innovation to achieve competitive differentiation; many businesses continue to make critical business decisions that are a product of intuition and haste rather than fact and rigor.

40% of major decisions are still based on your Manager’s gut feeling

The question as to why companies continue to rely on ‘best-guesses’, despite the availability of advanced business analytics, quantitative models and optimisation methods is confounding. Using data and quantitative analysis to support decision making, removes ambiguity and improves speed and accuracy. Decision making is more likely to be correct and the process has more rigor due to the application of the scientific method.

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Our philosophy is to make the power of mathematics accessible. Why? Because we think it isn’t currently very accessible, this limits the number of people who can use it to get value and reduces the value derived by those who do use it, and that’s a crying shame in a world that desperately needs efficiency. We have all seen it multiple times in multiple organisations. It’s the hard to use (probably ugly), not really fit for purpose (lots of workarounds), complicated IT (n tier, client/server, VM, Citrix, Oracle thing) approach to providing optimisation software.

COTS vs Bespoke

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COTS (commercial off the shelf) puts the bars around accessible Mathematics: leads to crying babies

Our philosophy is to make the power of mathematics accessible. Why? Because we think it isn’t currently very accessible, this limits the number of people who can use it to get value and reduces the value derived by those who do use it, and that’s a crying shame in a world that desperately needs efficiency.

We have all seen it multiple times in multiple organisations. It’s the hard to use (probably ugly), not really fit for purpose (lots of workarounds), complicated IT (n tier, client/server, VM, Citrix, Oracle thing) approach to providing optimisation software.

So how did it come into being? Here’s how I see it:

“I’m unique; give me your shrink wrapped product!” – and other amusing procurement stories

Let’s assume requirements are done, I’ll save organisational scope bloat for another time. The next question is build or buy? How will we best get something that is a close match to need/requirements?

So a market search ensues only to discover that the requirements are pretty unique. So a custom/bespoke solution is required! That makes sense but most organisations quickly discover that bespoke = expensive (time and money), just like buying a tailor made suit is more expensive than buying off the rack.

It’s for this reason that hard core mathematics/optimisation solutions have mainly been consumed by capital intensive industries where spending a few million to save tens or hundreds of millions made the business case stack up.

Therefore organisations often seek a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) solution (often after an expensive run in with a bespoke approach), with the expectation that if they specify what they need and buy something “off the shelf” that fits then it should be low risk (time and money). It appears to be quite an entrenched view with Australian CIOs, and in some cases is justified, particularly in back office functions that don’t offer opportunity for differentiation. A point Wesfarmers Insurance CIO David Hackshall and DoD CIO Peter Lawrence make in an article by Brian Corrigan on itnews.com.au titled “How COTS became Australia’s default software setting”.

In the world of mathematics, optimisation and advanced planning and scheduling it would be a very rare occasion with a simple set of generic requirements where COTS really worked. Take one of the classical problems where mathematics are applied, vehicle routing. This is a well picked over area and sounds simple enough. Nonetheless, vendors fill niches within this niche in order to provide a match to requirements. As the Vehicle Routing survey in February 2014 issue OR/MS Today says “VR customers are different, and so are their routing needs and problems, which require flexible, innovative answers”.

Vendors react to this COTS centric procurement environment in a predictable way, and of course say they sell COTS because otherwise when they get evaluated on the inevitable RFX criteria they would fail miserably. The solution? They will (and I’ve been there) include “configuration” or “installation services” as ways to mask software development. The result? You get something that wasn’t a great fit with lots of add on development to meet your requirements. It’s hard to use, slow and doesn’t really provide the solutions you were hoping for. In many cases you end up with the worst of both worlds, the cost of bespoke but the poor fit of COTS.

As the aforementioned itnews.com.au article says “The middle ground between buying readymade software and building bespoke solutions is to customise a COTS package. Yet as many CIOs have discovered at great cost to their budgets and mental health, this can be a painful experience.”

This COTS/bespoke paradox is the problem we saw and it is what we aim to address. So what does Biarri do differently? We take the benefits of bespoke and make it cheaply and quickly. You could say we aim to provide the best of both worlds.

Do the math

How do we do it? First of all, we do the maths first! Prove you can solve the underlying problem and that’s it is worth solving before investing in the delivery mechanism. Once you know there is value in the maths, make sure people can digest it via a well-designed solution. The Biarri Workbench is our SaaS platform that allows us to very quickly develop easy to use, custom applications with unique workflows with an iterative/agile and light deployment.

Who says B2C owns good UX?

Easy to use means designed with the user in mind. In the consumer world (B2C) this is the natural order of things (thanks Apple). In the business world (B2B) this has taken a back seat, and that’s where our industrial designers come in. Working with users to really understand how they do their job and will interact with the system. Producing mock-ups/concepts and getting early feedback before a line of code is written.

So now we’ve proven the maths will provide value and designed a solution that users will love to use.

Mock up example

Our philosophy is to make the power of mathematics accessible. Why? Because we think it isn’t currently very accessible, this limits the number of people who can use it to get value and reduces the value derived by those who do use it, and that’s a crying shame in a world that desperately needs efficiency. We have all seen it multiple times in multiple organisations. It’s the hard to use (probably ugly), not really fit for purpose (lots of workarounds), complicated IT (n tier, client/server, VM, Citrix, Oracle thing) approach to providing optimisation software.

Rinse and Repeat

What comes next is turning this into reality quickly, cheaply and iteratively. Quickly and cheaply are thanks to the Biarri Workbench providing security, common database, existing UI components, libraries and widgets that enable a custom built application to be constructed very quickly. And “iteratively” is thanks to being web delivered which means we can provide early access to users to start providing feedback. Agile development takes on real meaning as users see the mock-ups they helped design come alive in their web browser mere weeks (or even just days) after designing them. Engagement and user buy-in are huge as feedback is provided, incorporated and delivered instantly. Australia Posts CIO Andrew Walduck understands this approach, “The number of times I’ve seen operating models where you start with requirements on one side, you dump it into operations on the other, and it fundamentally misses the point”.

Tool UI Example

Example of tool UI

It takes different strokes to move the world… yes it does

Do you remember the late 70’s early 80’s TV series “Different Strokes”? I use to love the theme song.

Everybody’s got a special kind of story
Everybody finds a way to shine,
It don’t matter that you got not alot
So what,
They’ll have theirs, and you’ll have yours, and I’ll have mine.
And together we’ll be fine….

When you start looking for your next optimisation, analytics or advanced planning and scheduling solution and your CIO/CFO says “budgets are tight and you can’t buy bespoke, you have to go COTS”, remember “it don’t matter that you got not a lot… you’ll have yours” because Biarri has a special kind of story.