Visualization, optimization, business strategy: a case study

We describe a visualization application intended for operational use in formulating business strategy in the customer service arena. The visualization capability provided in this application implicitly allows the user to better formulate the objective function for large optimization runs which act to minimize costs based on certain input parameters. Visualization is necessary because many of the inputs to the optimization runs are themselves strategic business decisions which are not pre-ordained. Both information visualization presentations and three-dimensional visualizations are included to help users better understand the cost/benefit tradeoffs of these strategic business decisions. Here, visualization explicitly provides value not possible algorithmically, as the perceived benefit of different combinations of service level does not have an a priori mathematical formulation. Thus, we take advantage of the fundamental power of visualization, bringing the user's intuition and pattern recognition skills into the solution, while simultaneously taking advantage of the strength of algorithmic approaches to quickly and accurately find an optimal solution to a well-defined problem.