Informing your decisions

Examples of OR in action

OR is best explained by example.  This page contains several examples of projects carried out by Orvis Consulting staff.

Contractor selection

The Customer was planning to implement a self-service personnel system for an organisation of about 200,000 staff.  It was clear that a considerable degree of customisation of HR system products would be required to meet the challenging system requirements.  Decision analysis was used to construct a contractor evaluation process that was rigorous and auditable.  This enabled the Customer to identify a clear preference for the lead contractor.  But the decision analysis process also enabled a potential legal challenge to be averted, because an unsuccessful bidder could be shown exactly how their tender had fallen short and could be demonstrated to have failed on several counts.

Business benefits analysis

The Customer was in the process of acquiring modern technology to underpin their world-class business.  However, it was essential to strengthen the business case for the acquisition and modernisation.  The OR consultant explored all of the underlying reasons for the modernisation programme and developed a map of the business benefits.  This was then used by the Board to articulate the key arguments that led to the selection of the technologies.

Network management system

The Customer required a strong business case in order to invest in improvements to their complex communications networks.  A wide range of technical improvements were under consideration including bandwidth capacity and security.  However, an alternative approach was to improve network management to gain a better level of service from existing technologies and networks rather then simply investing in new equipment.  OR was used to construct analytical models of the network management process in order to demonstrate that improvements to basic network management processes could give significant improvements to the overall quality of service.