Aussie start-up Biarri reckons it has found a way to give even small businesses access to some of the most powerful mathematical modelling tools available.
New start-up Biarri reckons it has found a way to give even
small businesses access to some of the most powerful mathematical
modelling tools available, to solve complex problems simply and at
a price more people can afford.
(Credit: Biarri)
Each year the mathematical discipline of operations research
saves large companies millions of dollars by helping them optimise
complex problems. It was originally used by Allies during the
Second World War to determine the best means of organising North
Atlantic convoys to avoid attacks by German U-boats.
The heavy mathematical processing required for modern operations
research means that today it has typically been used by large
companies such as airlines, miners and transport companies, and has
been out of reach of smaller business.
A simple example in the transport industry is calculating the
best sequences of deliveries for a van that is carrying 50
different items; as the number of possible sequences starts to
rival the number of stars in the galaxy. It is commonly used to
optimise supply chains, predict customer behaviour, or conduct
rapid analysis of complex sets of data. And it requires a lot of
computing power.
Biarri co-founder Joe Forbes says his company has found a way of
making operations research affordable for a much wider range of
business. Rather than purchasing dozens of servers to run the
mathematical algorithms, it purchases computing power from Amazon's
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to do the hard work.
Now it is developing a web-based service, dubbed Workbench,
which will enable customers to access its tools via the internet,
effectively moving the entire process of operations research into
the cloud.
Forbes says that Biarri has conducted more than a dozen
custom projects for clients since it was founded in January,
building up a repository of different modelling engines that are
suited to solving specific operations research problems.
The Workbench service, which is expected to go live before the
end of September, will include models for a wide range of tasks
including production planning, staff scheduling, and yield or
portfolio optimisation.
We are trying to make it accessible and to democratise mathematics by making it easy to get your hands on
Biarri co-founder Joe Forbes
"We are trying to make it accessible and to democratise
mathematics by making it easy to get your hands on, with a GUI and
a database that everyone understands," Forbes says.
Forbes says that while the online service will most likely meet
no more than 90 per cent of the exact requirements of many
customers, he believes the reduced price will see them happy to
accept this trade-off.
For those that want a fully-customised outcome, Biarri is
continuing to deliver tailored projects, and the software can also
be customised and installed within the systems of clients who want
permanent access to operations research capabilities. For the rest,
Forbes believes the Workbench will be affordable for smaller
business, such as delivery companies with fleets of around 10
vehicles.
"It's to do with the economics of cloud computing — if we'd
started Biarria two years ago we'd have hundreds of thousands of
dollars on equipment to host things," Forbes says. "That enables us
to take all this clever stuff that has been around a long time and
make it cheap and accessible. And our challenge is to make it
usable and fast."
Commentary
There is nothing new about operations research. What is new
about Biarri's service is that it will be affordable for a much
wider range of companies,
The company is already making a living conducting bespoke
operations research projects for clients on a consulting basis.
Each time it does it learns something new that it can feed into its
cloud-based solution. And there is demand out there. Biarri has doubled in size to six
full-time employs since January, with another 10 casual
workers.
The next big challenge will be convincing smaller businesses of
the value of operations research, and getting them to use the web
service. But given the company is already profitable, Forbes says
he isn't even including online revenue in his business model.
"That's the blue sky part of the business, but we can survive
without it," Forbes says.
