[vasco]

If nobody does something in a whole industry perhaps it's because it's not a differentiating factor. Do you have a link to the Swedish company? It just sounds like typical "software engineers know better" story where they go bankrupt after a few years because turns out the important bits are in other parts of the business.

[lukan]

I am interested in that company as well.

A recent example of "knowing better optimisation experts" I know of in my local area are with garbage trucks. A expensive company was hired to optimize - yet they apparently forgot some real world factors, like with snow and ice not all the trucks can go everywhere, some roads too narrow, etc. with the result of chaos and the workers fighting succesfully to be allowed to continue influence their working schedule, they sucesfully managed without the external experts.

People do inefficient things. And they also do it for years, thinking it is a universal law. But usually an expert from the outside will still not know better how to do things.

[nialse]

The company would probably be Airmee, they have a scheduled delivery at my door in an hour.

https://www.kth.se/en/om/innovation/alumner/airmee-levererar...

https://www.airmee.com/en/

[idiotsecant]

Yes, this story is far too soothing to the software engineering ego to be actually true! Generally real world problems are messy, hard, and full of human problems. It's a little aggravating when 'software engineers know everything' stories like this are taken at face value and reinforce that mistaken idea.

[QuantumGood]

True stories like this happen, but generally only when a domain expert on the business side was incorporated from the beginning—and that may not be mentioned by the software side.

[ge0ffrey]

There is truth in this.

Without involving the human planners, the project won't succeed. We're empowering them, with PlanningAI assistance, so they can focus on what they planning must do, for who, instead of how it gets there. So when the plan goes off the rails - 5 people call in sick - they can get it back on the rails in seconds with Real-Time Planning.

The engineering work is only half the work, or less. Fitting the technology into the human processes is another big chunk. Half of my videos on youtube deal with such cases: Continuous Planning, Real-Time Planning, Non-distruptive Replanning, Pinning, ... Not code, not technology, but design patterns.

And even then, this is far from 100% of the solution. Technology and education is still not enough.

That human planner with 30 years of business knowledge in his/her head is still a critical: he/she will always need to tweak, oversee and sometimes overrule the planning solution in production.

[yorak]

Sorry to dissapoint you and the few other curious ones, this was some 10 years ago and such details such as name of the company have fell of from my overfilled brain long ago. While the person who told me the story is a reputable fellow I must admit they still are a secondhand source. Being a finn I tend to trust people and take their word on it and, hence, do not recall doing my research to factcheck.

Still, it _is_ a good story, and plausible based on what I saw to be the state of the industry back then. Your run of the mill last-mile courier services were really badly organized, from the mathematics and optimization side as simple as they get, and ability to build a robust optimization transportation management system would've given serious competitive edge.

(edit: removed repeated words)

[bsder]

I, too, would like the reference.

However I can tell you that this kind of thing really does happen. One of the injection molding conferences I attended had several presentations where companies were contemplating building more injection molding lines, but instead hired consultants (of course rolls eyes) to re-optimize their injection mold programs. After tweaking all the parameters in to speed up injection rates, it turned out the company had about 50% more capacity than they thought.

Now, I suspect this was shit management more than anything. I strongly suspect that the people on the line told their superiors that they needed to fix the programs and got ignored.

However, you couldn't sell anything to the management chain until they were staring at having to spend cash. Selling people on "saving money" is always super difficult as it requires them to change something that is nominally "working". Selling people on "not having to spend money they are staring at imminently" is always way easier. Obviously the easiest sell is "spend money to make a lot more money", but that doesn't happen all that often.