Founded by CEO Steve Sashihara in 1980 and still headquartered in Princeton, we help clients improve performance through the successful deployment of AI and Optimization. Blending world-class technical expertise and deep business insight, our consultants work in small, agile teams to provide transformational solutions and services that drive innovation. Our firm’s leaders are frequent authors and guest speakers on best practices in AI and Optimization for business and technical executives.
Where Do You Want to Innovate?
Successful AI and Optimization begin with selecting the right area of opportunity. We work with executives on three levels to help them change the game:
1. Operating Efficiency. Reaching new heights of productivity and reliability; doing things faster, better, cheaper.
2. New Product Development. Creating a new product or service to break away from the competition.
3. New Business Model. Creating an entirely new business—staking out a new frontier or reinventing your value proposition
We look for situations in which decisions are highly repetitive over short periods of time, across departments, or in multiple locations. Very small improvements in the quality of each decision can add up to big-time savings. In examining how the decisions are made, we explore if it would be valuable to “scope up” and consider the impact of each decision on the entire network, not just on a single location. AI and Optimization can transform decision making about assets—any resource an organization owns or controls that can potentially add value.
AI and Optimization in Action
Princeton Consultants has a four-decade track record of developing and deploying breakthrough solutions for a diverse clientele of industry leaders and innovators. Here is a sample:
- We helped the U.S. Census Bureau optimize scheduling and routing of the 350,000 field enumerators for the 2020 Census, the first ever to use smart phones and optimized routing. This award-winning project helped overcome natural disasters and the pandemic, contributed to more than $2 billion in savings, and transformed how the census will be conducted going forward.
- For a healthcare provider with more than 3,000 facilities, we are developing a scheduling optimization system that will greatly improve safety, service, and efficiency. The system evaluates billions of combinations and tailors recommendations for each venue, its staff, and its patients.
- For two of the world’s largest transportation networks—including trucking, aircraft, rail, and ocean carriers—we are creating new-generation planning systems. Innovative optimization and simulation techniques handle Big Data’s complexity and deliver recommendations rapidly.
- For a biotech manufacturer, we built a manufacturing plant simulation and developed a custom scheduling optimization solution. These applications helped reduce high production costs resulting from small batch sizes and manual processing, and helped executives rigorously evaluate different scenarios related to process improvement, plant scheduling strategy, and capacity planning.
Choosing the Right People
AI and Optimization are challenging, creative endeavors that do not lend themselves to a large cast. When choosing the right opportunity, we look for the biggest possible prize; when constructing the right team, we look for the smallest possible team, which is typically made up of a project sponsor, subject matter experts, support personnel, and optimization consultants.
Princeton Consultants has worked with, hired, and cultivated many AI and Optimization executives and team members. We can say that employees skilled in AI and Optimization possess both an inquisitive nature and the quantitative skills needed to turn results into tangible rules for optimization software. They have an “experimentation mindset.”
Much has been said about the United States’ need to strengthen math and engineering courses in its schools to compete on a global basis. It’s a good start, but it is not sufficient. To lead the next wave of innovation, we need not only math majors and engineers, but also individuals with outstanding communication skills and creativity. If you would like to explore AI and Optimization to innovate at your organization, we will welcome a conversation.
