Personalization has been all the rage in retail over the past few years.

In recent years, the application of optimization techniques has been gaining traction to operationalize insights from advanced analytics and predictive models to prescribe best set of decisions in various business domains. Use cases and application areas are wide – examples range from predictive maintenance to retail assortment optimization and workforce scheduling to achieve organizational goals.

To understand what optimization is, how it relates to predictive analytics, and why it is so critical for businesses today, we set a discussion with Houston Analytics’ optimization specialist Sami Löfman.