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Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Mathematics
The average person makes between 20,000 and 35,000 decisions a day – a figure that is expected to rise in the coming decades, due largely to digitalization and the growing availability of information. Every decision a business makes has a direct impact on many stakeholders, from customers and employees to shareholders and society at large. At INFORM, we believe that business decisions and processes can be vastly optimized with the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced mathematics. This is the route to our customers’ greater success and sustainability. In doing so, we stand for a transparent, ethical approach to AI and close partnerships with our customers.
Our Mission
We see ourselves as pioneers for sustainable value creation through digital processes with optimized decisions. Our commitment is to make organizations resilient, sustainable, and positioned for success.
We recognize that decisions must meet a multitude of goals including economic, ecological, and social. When decisions are based on our intelligent systems, risk, complexity, and costs are significantly reduced, while resilience, productivity and sustainability are substantially increased. Through holistically optimized solutions, this can be accomplished. We count this as one of our core competencies.
Successful software pioneer for over 50 years
Few other European-based software companies still in existence can claim to be more experienced than INFORM: Our journey dates back to March 1969. That is when Professor Hans-Jürgen Zimmerman, Chair of Operations Research at RWTH Aachen University in Germany through 1998, founded INFORM (Institute for Operations Research and Management). His goal was to demonstrate the entrepreneurial added value of intelligent algorithms as a core business activity. Back then, the term AI was hardly known, and digital data was lacking.
Fast forward to the present and our software is optimizing billions of decisions every day in a cross-section of industries, from aviation, transportation, and logistics, to financial, manufacturing, and telecommunications. It is used for diverse applications, including demand and production planning, workforce management, logistics and transportation, inventory management, risk management, and financial fraud prevention.
Going the Extra Mile for Our Customers
For decades, INFORM has been building industry and process expertise with dedicated, growing teams. We train our employees to become experts in certain industries and markets so they can accurately map specific business and decision environments with our software. Concurrently, we are continually expanding our expertise both organically and by recruiting new specialists at our headquarter in Germany and at our group companies around the world. This expert knowledge helps to ensure excellent software that is perfectly adapted to a specific industry’s needs and which offers the flexibility to meet individual companies’ requirements.
INFORM does not develop “one size fits all” solutions. Instead, we rely on highly configurable software tailored to prevailing conditions in our target markets. In this way, our systems meet the high requirements that enable optimization. Additionally, we are organically developing new business areas instead of imposing simplified procedures on arbitrary problems.
Optimization does not just mean “improvement”, but rather it means deriving and implementing the best solution in a given situation using the vast amount of data and courses of action available today – while always considering the individual corporate goals.
Hybrid AI – The Best of Both Worlds
INFORM’s software today integrates data- and knowledge-based methods of AI such as machine learning and mathematical methods including optimization algorithms from operations research or fuzzy logic. In this hybrid approach (Hybrid AI), we combine the best of both worlds: We draw insights from the wealth of data available to companies and recognize patterns, as well as correlations, in order to make precise forecasts, for example. We do not, however, rely exclusively on this machine learning. We map our expert knowledge regarding business processes, behavioral patterns, planning goals or constraints through mathematical decision modeling. Our algorithms can quickly browse through all potential decision spaces. Considering these countless variants of how to act in any given decision situation, our software is able to decide the best course of action for the task at hand, and then execute or suggest it to the user. This is all accomplished in the spirit of respectful cooperation between man and machine, building on the best of both worlds.
To this end, INFORM is increasingly focusing on cloud-based solutions that provide customers with easy access to AI systems. Users can collaborate with AI technologies in a trusted framework and in a sustainable manner. With our responsible guidelines for dealing with artificial intelligence, however, we ensure that this is done with due regard for ethical aspects.