Category Archives: Business optimization tools

Creating a Business Dashboard in R

Business dashboards are available in many shapes and sizes. Business dashboards are useful to create an overview of key performance indicators (KPIs) important for the business strategy and/or operations.

There are many flavours of dashboard frameworks and apps available, ranging in price from thousands of dollars to open-source implementations.

Apparently there are four key elements to a good dashboard:

  • Simple, communicates easily
  • Minimum distractions…it could cause confusion
  • Supports organized business with meaning and useful data
  • Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information

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March 28, 2013Permalink 6 Comments

Using column generation to minimize production waste

Minimizing production waste can result in significant cost savings. However, calculating just the right production configuration can be a tedious task.

Let’s take the example of a firm which delivers sheet metal. The sheets it delivers are all of the same width but can differ in length. The raw material used by the company are metal sheets of 3 meters wide by 20 meters long. Clients can order any length metal sheets (as long as it doesn’t exceed 20 meters).

Let’s say there is demand for the following lengths of sheet metal (all are 3 meters wide). The number of demands are denoted in the next line. E.g. for 40 items of length 6 have to be produced, 5 items of length 9 have to be produced and so on.

items_demands
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December 11, 2012Permalink Leave a comment