iM Version 8 feat iM-Optimizer

A small process model just to show the new iM-Optimizer feature. The model tackles the challenge of a small enterprise that needs to allocate resources (sales people and production people) to develop and produce its products and then market them, as it needs to decide the product life cycle as older products are more difficult to sell and at the same time the development of new products costs money (time) and means to stop the running production.

It can be easily extended to include
- a maximum budget or maximum number of employees
- a waste of unsold products once the new product is in production
- a limitation of size of the market (e.g. a bass diffusion function)
- the dependence between marketing efforts and price
- a wearing out of machines or other resources
- learning curve and quality issues with new products
- a limitation of storage capacity
- a logistic chain
- ....

So right now there are just three range() functions to let the iM-Optimizer process the optimal number of production people and marketing people and the optimal time span to renew its product in order to maximize the profit.

Note: once you have identified the optimal parameters you could try a monte carlo simulation on the bandwidth of possible developments using e.g. gaussrandom() to vary the average time it takes to develop a new product etc..

If you have chosen a target, e.g. the maximization of profit the iM-Optimizer tells you which three outcome are probably the best. The spaghetti plot, then, selects/highlights the best. ....

.... you can then switch the view in order to see what combination of parameters was behind the selected scenario. In this case it is 20 sales persons, 18 production persons and 10 weeks until they should come up with a new product.

Note: it cannot be shown with the Presenter, yet, but if you look at process factors you will see the constraints for each process now with version 8 of the iMODELER highlighted through grey background color. So you do not have to look and interpret for yourself anymore what limits each process.