I’m writing this in the middle of the Rugby World Cup. As an England fan, I’m pleased that we have won the first two matches. Readers will be able to judge whether that continued to be the case. I am also pleased to be able to include in this issue an account of the work of Insight Analysis, who have supported the England team with their sports performance analysis.
The purpose of Impact is to demonstrate the usefulness of Operational Research/analytical approaches by reporting, from a wide variety of organisations, successful applications of these methods. You may, therefore, be surprised to find in this issue a story of failure: not failure of the analysis, but failure to get the (unpalatable?) results accepted. Dennis Sherwood was commissioned in 2013 by Ofqual, the organisation which regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England, to investigate the systems within which they operate. His work highlighted the fundamental problem caused by attempting to map fuzzy marks into grades. His subsequent statistical analysis led to an estimate that a quarter of the grades awarded to GCSE, AS and A level students are wrong, a result which was rejected by Ofqual. In 2016, however, Ofqual changed the rules for appeals, making it harder for a candidate to request a re-mark. So perhaps his analytical work was not ignored!
There are several accounts of successful applications of analytical methods in this issue. Of note are two from Germany. Our cover features a Mercedes-Benz car, illustrating the account of Marc Fischer’s work to model the effects of their advertising and produce an optimal advertising budget split for their new cars. The result is an estimated savings of around €2m per campaign. The lead article concerns German Rail and tells of Janis Neufeld’s development of an algorithm to give significant cost reductions and simplify the planning process for crew shift schedules.
I hope you enjoy reading all the reports of how O.R. and analytics continue to make an impact. Electronic copies of all issues are available at https://issuu.com/orsimpact. For future issues of this free magazine, please subscribe at http://www.getimpactmagazine.co.uk/.
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