A new dawn for optimisation

“It’s been an incredible few years for us as a business,” explains Colin Ferguson, CEO of Optimize, the new name for the Algorithm People, when we caught up with him recently. He’s got a smile on his face, so we assume the developments have been positive. “We have seen some stellar growth at the business since we launched in 2018 and we have clearly demonstrated a market need for our services, which our customers very much appreciate.”

Stellar indeed… Ferguson explains the company recorded year on year growth of over 250% for its financial year ending September 2022 and with some recent high profile contract wins – Abel & Cole, Barcode Warehouse, Pall-Ex, to name just a few – the company is well on the way to bettering that performance this year. The company is well funded – announcing £2.2 million of private capital investment in the final quarter of 2022 –and with a number of recent new appointments to the senior management team, the company is well placed to scale its business offer both in the UK and internationally.

Highest levels of service

“We have laid the foundations for growth and are now preparing our business, resources and infrastructure to maintain our growth trajectory,” he explains. “We are bringing in additional talent to compliment our existing resources and I expect the team to grow by a third over the year ahead. It is essential we continue to expand the organisation to maintain the highest levels of services to our customers.”

Never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Ferguson is driven to maintain the ethos of continual improvement at the company, pushing the business to deliver performance benefits to its expanding client base. Over the past 18 months, it has been developing a suite of new optimisation algorithms based upon artificial intelligence and machine learning, with the aim of accelerating fleet decarbonisation and generating further efficiencies within fleets by harnessing the power of AI. This bedrock of the business enables the services and software to be enhanced giving fleet operators simple-to-use access points to the highly complex world of optimisation.

Vital first step

“The question is no longer whether operators can afford optimisation, it’s whether they can afford to be without it,” Ferguson states. “The time’s coming when anyone running vehicles will have to optimise them. The savings on fuel, the increase in productivity and the reduction in the number of vehicles needed speak for themselves commercially. But it’s also a vital first step in the decarbonisation journey that all operators will have to take.”

Optimisation in final mile or van fleets can produce fuel savings of up to 20%. To put that in a decarbonisation context, a 500-strong facilities management fleet could be saving more carbon through optimisation than if it exchanged 80 internal combustion engined vehicles for electric – with none of the cost. Although HGV fleets tend to still rely on the experienced transport planner, their fuel bills are so high and the availability of alternative powered vehicles so limited, that exploring optimisation is a no-brainer.

“Optimisation is available today for all fleets,“ says Ferguson. “Making your existing fleet as efficient and productive as possible now, is a necessary first step to decarbonisation – but in the long run it will be essential to commercial survival.” Many fleets are already seeing the benefits of optimisation, be it through the pay-as-you-go My Transport Planner software as a service platform, or a more in-depth bespoke application of the Optimize suite of existing algorithms to power their business development. The next generation algorithm will power even more applications for the company. “Our approach isn’t simply producing better results than a human can. We’ve already established this, and the technology is proven,” Ferguson continues. “Our approach is considerably ahead of our competitors, both in terms of the savings and efficiencies we generate, and its potential.

“Traditional approaches are bottom up and iterative, where operators have to do, or pay for, extensive modelling, and resetting of parameters to get a good outcome. They are essentially having to feed in new and repetitive data, depending on the use case.

“What we’re doing is top down, where you set your business objectives, and parameters and the software will give you a good outcome very quickly without you having to worry about any of that,” he says. “You get better, faster results, with none of the time-intensive iterations or costly scenario modelling. It’s no longer necessary.

“What’s more, we are just enrolling in a quantum computing project, to explore how our algorithms can be applied to this rapidly expanding area of research.”