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October 15, 2020 In Company News

Private Aviation Innovators BoldIQ and Jet Edge International Announce Partnership

Bellevue, WA – October 15, 2020 – BoldIQ and Jet Edge International are combining forces to deliver a uniquely responsive private aviation service. Looking to drive further growth, Jet Edge will employ BoldIQ’s best-in-class optimization technology, Solver, to enhance and augment its planning and scheduling process. Solver, powered by AI and programmed by expert Operations Research scientists, will support this leader in the burgeoning private aviation sector.

“We are tremendously excited by this partnership with a great company like Jet Edge,” said Shelly Freeman, COO at BoldIQ, “Our team looks forward to supporting its growth with a solution that will increase utilization and network efficiency in real-time.”

“BoldIQ’s optimization technology will be a key enabler as we expand our fleet and product set,” noted Jet Edge CBDO Gary Waldman, “This partnership will provide the capability to adapt even more quickly to a changing market as we pursue our mission of providing a complete end-to-end aviation services solution for all private jet flyers, buyers, and aircraft owners worldwide.”

About Jet Edge International
Jet Edge International is a premier private aviation services platform that provides a full suite of services to aircraft owners, including flight operations, charter services, in-house maintenance and repairs, and aircraft sales and acquisitions. The company was built to service the most sophisticated individuals and corporations in the world with focus on safety, security, and flawless execution. Jet Edge is a Top 3 Large-cabin charter operator in the United States and adheres to the three most prominent safety standards in the industry: ARGUS Platinum, Wyvern Wingman, and the International Standard for Business Operations (IS-BAO) Stage 3 certification.
For more information about JetEdge International aircraft management, private jet charter, and aircraft sales please visit: www.flyjetedge.com.

You may also view this announcement on the JetEdge site.

About BoldIQ
BoldIQ provides on-demand scheduling in real-time at a large scale for dynamic customers whose complex operations change daily. Built on a strong foundation of Operations Research science and operational AI, BoldIQ’s Solver is an advanced planning and scheduling platform delivering safe, quick and cost-effective technology for true on-demand scheduling for operations at scale.
BoldIQ’s optimized scheduling helps customers free up to 30% of their resources and reduce operating costs by up to 25%, increasing profitability of up to 20%.

October 13, 2020 In Industry News

Maximizing fleet operator resources as competition for drivers heats up again

Perhaps surprising no one, Schneider recently announced a pay increase for its drivers – on the homepage of its website no less. Many smaller companies have increased driver per mile rates for a while now, but with many carriers forecasting demand that edges ever closer to pre-pandemic levels, driver costs are on the rise.

A quick scan of the truck manufacturing numbers bears this out. In a recent article, American Trucker looks at Class 8 truck production as a strong economic indicator for the industry, and saw that net orders surged in September, hitting 32,000 units — the most since October 2018. September order activity is up 55% compared to August and 160% compared to September 2019.

With all that, the competition between carriers for drivers was bound to heat up. Freight Waves is openly speculating, with probable cause, that this opening salvo by a major operator is sure to spur its competition to match or even exceed the $0.61 a mile Schneider is saying its drivers can make.

Once the large carriers all join the pay fray, they will once again be forced to find other ways to retain drivers as well as rationalize and optimize schedules to increase driver utility. This means filling more orders and generating more revenue to cover additional per mile expenses, all while continuing to maintain other cost structures, as well as service and safety parameters.

Here at BoldIQ, we have seen that customers describe one of Solver’s chief benefits is its ability to maximize utilization of existing assets and personnel, and to do that in real-time. Solver’s preference-based scheduling harnesses the power of operational AI to optimize resources, loads and routes while considering regulations and business rules in real time. In the end, they push more orders through the same or even fewer fleet resources.

For example, in a recent case study we completed with an industry leading supply chain solutions provider, Solver improved order fulfillment by 11%. For carriers this means less spot market activity, clearly a cost saving measure, and for those with large dedicated and for-hire fleets, it also contributes to increased revenue.

Another carrier we worked with wanted to optimize an existing schedule by employing rules that prioritize giving drivers more nights at home as part of a driver retention strategy. This scenario will come likely into play in the new year as it becomes a “drivers” market.

Solver’s operational AI optimized resources, loads and routes while considering regulations and business rules in real time, increasing the total number of miles driven in the same duty shifts by 18.5% and the actual drive time by 18.7%. Preferred drivers were granted their preferred duty shifts and were able to pack more miles into each of those shifts. The result was more pay for valued drivers, and of course more nights at home if so desired.

The bottom line is that with AI optimization, carriers can balance duty hours for drivers evenly if that is the business priority or provide more duty hours to preferred drivers to increase driver satisfaction and retention. Additionally, Solver can prioritize company drivers and owner operators based on the fleet operator preference.

Importantly, Solver’s AI optimized scheduling generates an immediate increase revenue by deploying existing assets to fulfill a greater number of orders. Over a longer period, this results in a corresponding increase in revenue and profitability, and most critically, an edge in this increasingly competitive market beyond just a few cents more a mile.

Read the original article on LinkedIn

September 16, 2020 In Company News

BoldIQ a top 50 Admired Company for 2020

CEO Views have selected BoldIQ as one of the top 50 Admired Companies of the year 2020.

With its AI-powered planning and scheduling solutions for aviation, logistics, and other complex industries, the company’s Solver is state-of-the-art technology for real-time decision making to drive greater utilization and maximum efficiency. Even at this unprecedented time, Solver customers continue to grow, be profitable, and scale to keep pace with disruption and increasing customer demand. Not surprisingly, at BoldIQ’s core is a customer-centric, delivery-focused team. These scientists and technologists are the foundation of the company’s performance and delivery excellence.

“It’s a great honor to announce BoldIQ as one of the top 50 Admired Companies of the year 2020,” said Ben Johnson, Managing Editor of CEO Views.

“We are constantly innovating and improving Solver,” remarked Shelly Freeman, COO of BoldIQ,” and are therefore grateful to be recognized as one of the best in class in the technology landscape.”

About BoldIQ

BoldIQ provides on-demand scheduling in real-time at a large scale for dynamic customers whose complex operations change daily. Built on a strong foundation of Operations Research science and operational AI, BoldIQ’s Solver is an advanced planning and scheduling platform delivering safe, quick and cost-effective technology for true on-demand scheduling for operations at scale. BoldIQ’s optimized scheduling helps customers free up to 30% of their resources and reduce operating costs by up to 25%, increasing profitability of up to 20%.

About CEO Views

Published from Farmington Hills, Michigan, CEO Views is a print and digital magazine that aims towards providing the perfect platform for entrepreneurs to connect with the industry peers while exploring and understanding innovations that are changing the technology landscape of today and moving towards a newer world.

Keeping Pilots, Crew and Passengers Safe During Pandemic Conditions

There is no precedent in the aviation industry for how difficult 2020 has been so far.

“Financially, 2020 will go down as the worst year in the history of aviation.” declared Alexandre de Juniac, IATA’s Director General and CEO. And as The Economist points out in this sobering report “this won’t just affect foreign holidays; it could disrupt the workings of the globalized world.”

However, halfway through this unimaginable year, we are finally seeing indications that air travel is starting to take wing once again. Private aviation is leading the way, with bookings up to around 80% of pre-pandemic levels. Not surprisingly, a significant number of these flights are new private jet fliers.

As more and more people look to take to the skies once again, we are helping our private aviation customers do the utmost to provide a safe, supportive and productive work environment while helping them keep sight of business goals and risks.

Our scientists and developers have spent a great deal of time over the last few challenging months helping these customers rethink how COVID-19 impacts customer and crew safety procedures, analyzing associated planning and scheduling implications, and projecting business impacts for various scenarios.

Passenger and crew safety are of course still the paramount drivers. However, today’s environment compels the added constraint of limiting human contact to the safety calculus. Even at the best of times, pilots and crews prefer to get back to home base every day if possible. Today, this has become a key driver for many planning and scheduling decisions.

Currently, we can reduce the number of contacts outside home and create work bubbles by grouping and pairing crews. Importantly, the schedule keeps them just a drive home at the end of the last leg whenever possible. This protects them as well as the passengers by limiting and even eliminating hotel stays, meaning they can avoid contact with different crews and terminal personnel as well as drivers and other service staff.

In short, our customers are using new rules to reduce overnights and travel times for crews. This keeps them in the air and reduces the general exposure for both them and their passengers.

Read the original article on LinkedIn.

April 30, 2020 In Company News

BoldIQ named one of 50 Leading Companies for 2020

In the latest of a string of honors for the Seattle-based software solutions provider, Silicon Review has named BoldIQ one of the 50 leading technology companies of 2020.

As one of the world’s trusted online and print community for business and technology professionals, Silicon Review choose BoldIQ for its innovative software platform. The company’s flagship product, Solver, combines AI with expert Operations Research science to deliver a leading optimization platform for advanced scheduling, disruption management and instant availability checks.

“We are excited to be selected as one of the leading companies this year,” said Shelly Freeman, BoldIQ’s COO, “All the credit is due to our team of dedicated and whip-smart people who continue to build complex scheduling solutions for our aviation and logistics customers.”

Read about the award here, and find a more detailed review of BoldIQ here.

October 29, 2019 In Company News

BoldIQ’s Solver featured in Tech Company News interview

In a recent interview with Tech Company News, BoldIQ’s Pete Moe talked about Solver, the AI-powered advanced planning and scheduling platform that is now moving beyond its roots in the private aviation industry. As other mission-critical and costly operations, such as surgery, or even logistics, need also to keep pace with daily disruptions and increasing customer demand.

As Pete tells it : “We enable them to scale for growth and profitability by ensuring the greatest possible resource utilization in real-time.”

Read the full interview

October 21, 2019 In Company News

BoldIQ’s OR scientists have changed the future of business

Operations Research (OR) is a young science, going back only to WWII, when the kind of collaborative AI we use for advanced planning and scheduling today was the stuff of science fiction. And while BoldIQ’s own OR scientists Alex Khmelnitsky and Eugene Taits are not quite of that vintage, they clearly remember how they came to realize the potential of OR in an increasingly on-demand world.

“We came from totally different fields,” explains Alex, “We were working on image compression technology, and then compression for audio and video.”

“And before that, theoretical physics and applied mathematics, so we were kind of total amateurs in this field, which turned out to be a good thing,” Eugene interjects with a chuckle.

Just to be clear, these “amateurs”, both original members of the BoldIQ team, are PhDs: Alex from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Eugene from the Belarusian State Technological University.

“But seriously, we think this gave us a fresh viewpoint on the problems as we started working on jet service optimization,” Alex continues, “From the very beginning OR was actually dedicated to optimizing scheduling and resource assignments. In fact, some of the very early computers were tasked with maximizing utilization problems, although it wasn’t yet ingrained in business thinking.”

“This was mostly in the planning stages, for static processes,” Eugene adds, “For instance, modeling a full supply chain. But computers were too slow, and there was no way to supply the necessary data to support real time decision making.”

And despite infinite advances in processing power, bandwidth and an abundance of data, they are still surprised at times by what they discover when it comes to business planning and scheduling.

“Even in the 21st century, there are big companies that are still scheduling in a highly manual way, using spreadsheets,” remarks Eugene, “and this is not suited very well to a schedule that changes fairly often due to disruptions.”

Alex picks up the point: “People are used to certain historical ways of solving planning problems, and these unfortunately continue to be taught. These are not applicable to real-time scheduling problems. Today, we can replace many assumptions and statistical predictions, and create more complicated models, as there is so much more data available to describe the scheduling process.”

“It’s like solving a very large multi-dimensional puzzle,” says Eugene, “These are complex problems that are very difficult to solve. But, if you can clearly describe the rules associated with your business, you can make critical business decisions much faster and with much better accuracy.”

This is so much more critical today, as on-demand takes on a whole new meaning. Customers want it here and now, or they will go where they can get it. And while OR is truly a science, like most science, there is an art to crafting problem models.

Not surprisingly, both men agree the most rewarding, and most challenging, part of OR is modeling. They credit their physics backgrounds, and a love of clean code, as the solid foundation from which they launched into operations research.

“In physics, to understand how a part of the universe works, you must first model it, and then solve using mathematical methods,” Alex explains, “A good model gives good results, and the physics really helped us know how to build good models.”

“And like physics, a significant amount of intuition and creativity is required for the modeling,” Eugene continues, “There are so many ways to describe a process, only some of which are helpful, and only some of those are computer-friendly. The ability to create a common-sense model that is also programmable, this is where the art comes in.”

As for the future, Eugene and Alex have a goal that will transform operations research: a generic optimization engine capable of solving a vast range of complex planning and scheduling problems.

“Our vision is that practically any complex optimization problem will be solved, and ultimately, without modeling or programming skills, only by natural human language input” states Alex.

“Why not?” asks Eugene, “Anywhere there is a mix of different processes, resources and events, and especially anywhere the schedule changes reasonably often due to disruptions, we now have the processing power, the bandwidth and the data to use AI for real-time decision making. ”

September 9, 2019 In Industry News

Work-life balance for truckers is key as driver shortage takes its toll

Breakthrough AI optimization technology for real-time scheduling shows that carriers are prioritizing drivers work-life balance while helping manage costs, service and safety for the company.

With over 70% of all freight tonnage being moved on the nation’s highways, most of the goods you eat, wear, walk on, live in and otherwise consume are transported on trucks. However, within the trucking industry, and increasingly beyond it, alarm bells are going off.

A driver shortage has been getting more severe over the last few years and is predicted to worsen. The American Trucking Associations (ATA) produced a study recently showing a shortfall of approximately 60,000 current qualified drivers in 2018. More critically, the average driver age is now at 46. While the industry is making efforts to attract a younger and more diverse workforce, success in this area has been limited. If the current aging driver workforce trend holds, the shortage will more than double to over 160,000 in ten years.

Importantly, the ATA study outlines how “qualified” means more than just a Class A license. The carriers continue to maintain stringent hiring processes, with safety and reliability being prime concerns. Moreover, traditional approaches for attracting and maintaining the best drivers, such as sign-on bonuses, increased compensation and premium rigs, are now mere table stakes. As a result, carriers struggle to find enough qualified drivers, which makes the impact of the shortage feel worse. Enterprising logistics executives are beginning to realize that these perks are just not going to be enough in the long haul. All the while these same executives need to consider costs, safety and service as well.

Interestingly, a quick survey of some of the threads in driver forums such as the TruckersReport shows that drivers place high value on more nights at home. A recent article in SupplyChain 24/7 backs this up, going on to say that providing an acceptable home-life balance for long-haul drivers is “no easy trick” .

As the shortage of qualified drivers intensifies, carriers look for more and different ways to attract and maintain these key business resources. An innovative approach sees leading carriers looking at advanced planning and scheduling solutions to give drivers more nights at home while maintaining cost structures, service, and safety parameters. Such preference-based scheduling harnesses the power of operational AI to optimize resources, loads and routes while considering regulations and business rules in real time.

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) is rapidly becoming a key element of an overall ERP strategy for many mission-critical industries, where optimizing resources in real-time and on-demand amounts to smart business. In trucking, APS begins with preference-based planning, with all available trucks, drivers, depots and goods and their respective locations, enabling straightforward fleet, platoon, lane and leg-level optimization. This means more orders are pushed through the same or even fewer fleet resources.

As the usual day-to-day unfolds, unplanned maintenance, sudden cargo limitations, and even last-minute customer changes get a speedy response, all while considering traffic, weather, and of course, driver nights at home, in real-time.

We are just starting to feel the impact of this worsening driver shortage. Visionary trucking companies recognize the clear and present need to manage the challenges of attracting and maintaining drivers, a key business resource. Advanced planning and scheduling not only enables a good work-life balance for their drivers, but reduces costs, improves service and maintains safety regulations.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn

August 21, 2019 In Industry News

Why surgery is so expensive

The latest developments in operational AI mean advanced scheduling and planning in real time and on demand is becoming a key element in the delivery of cost-effective surgical procedures with better patient outcomes.

Within the $3.65 trillion healthcare system, surgery is one of the highest cost centers, accounting for as much as 30% of that total, around one trillion dollars. This is a lot of money, but let’s consider all the aspects of a typical surgery: highly skilled physicians, nurses and support staff operating state-of-the-art equipment, requisite tests, medications, and surgical supplies, possibly implants too. Reliable pre-op and post-op transitions and care are key elements of every surgical procedure.

A health care center’s systems for case management, staff scheduling, lab, supply, and imaging all play an important role. Unfortunately, these systems are often disparate, and so data is gleaned and transferred manually from system to system. The surgery scheduling system is included in this mix, with its hourly, even minute-by-minute updates. And while some scheduling applications include staff skills criteria and equipment maintenance schedules, these are sometimes maintained on a simple spreadsheet. In the end, the actual live schedule may be posted on a whiteboard, requiring the daily surgery scheduling team to bounce between the various systems and sources, ensuring that all resources and processes are in place for each surgical procedure.

However, especially for large surgery centers, priorities are dynamic, and disruptions occur regularly. Emergencies arise. Procedures run late and so on. These not only have a cascading effect on the ongoing surgery schedule, but add overtime pay to the ballooning costs. Moreover, the operational staff are in a continuous catch up process, adjusting the various systems to reflect the dynamic situation. This leads to situations where surgeons, anesthesiologists and surgical nurses are waiting to enter the operating theater, as another procedure has run longer than expected. Delays like this are costly and negatively impact pre- and post-operative room assignments. And as the pre-op and recovery rooms fill up, the quality and consistency of patient care suffers too.

When the schedule is over-burdened, much needed breaks for the front-line medical professionals are often the first sacrifice. This despite the overwhelming evidence showing a rested, alert and coordinated team correlates strongly with better post-operative outcomes and shorter hospital stays, not to mention more satisfied employees.

It should come then as no surprise then that surgery is a major expense item in our health care system’s books. Skilled physicians and nurses and state-of-the-art operating theaters are premium assets. The business of healthcare demands that these critical resources be fully and optimally utilized, with a keen eye on improving patient outcomes every step of the way.

With the latest advances in operational AI, service optimization for surgical scheduling and planning sees the intricate operating room logistics iterated automatically as the schedule develops during the days leading up to the procedure. Throughout a day, as long-running operations and emergencies crop up, AI-optimized scheduling navigates the complex resource realignment in real-time and on-demand, while ensuring processes including mandated breaks are protected.

The paradox here is while science and medicine push the boundaries of what is surgically possible to save and improve lives, the complex set of resources and processes required to deliver these procedures lag behind. However, visionary organizations are beginning to recognize that AI optimization of these costly and critical resources with advanced scheduling and planning, they not only serve their bottom lines, but contribute to improved employee satisfaction and most importantly, better patient outcomes.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn

March 20, 2019 In Company News

BoldIQ named as one of the 30 fastest growing tech companies

Already seen as a top local company, Seattle-based BoldIQ is now getting national recognition with its next generation platform for AI-optimized real-time scheduling to help its customers scale, grow and be more profitable.

The Silicon Review interviewed CEO Erez Yarkoni as part of its spotlight on BoldIQ. With its initial success helping companies like NetJet get off the ground in a major way, Yarkoni is now leading a strong and growing team in taking BoldIQ’s proven platform out to more and different markets.

“It’s a demand-driven world, uninhibited by the constraints of supply, timing and disruption, ” said Yarkoni, “A business needs to be available whenever and wherever customers call. We help them figure out how to do that. Because our solution integrates into their operations management system, usually some sort of CRM or ERP platform, we collect the real time status of their available resources and pending service requests. This means that our proposed solutions are built holistically from a network perspective. When you can consider the whole picture like that, you can really ensure the right resources are assigned to the right task.”

Read the full article

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