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As artificial intelligence (AI) gains attention as a tool for solving corporate problems, LG CNS has built Korea’s only professional consulting organization using "Mathematical Optimization" as its weapon. What began in 2017 as a pilot project with 3 to 4 consultants has grown into a team of about 50 master’s and doctoral-level experts and has carried out more than 200 projects over the past 9 years. The secret behind LG CNS’ ability to present optimal solutions to each decision-making problem facing its clients was its field-centered approach. Instead of forcing the field into the framework of commercial solutions, optimization consultants deeply understood each domain, drew out tacit knowledge from the field and built optimization engines tailored to each company. In cases ranging from the production of air conditioner indoor and outdoor units and the consolidation of logistics centers for a food and beverage company to search ad bidding optimization during an unprecedented pandemic crisis, mathematical optimization produced results that human intuition and experience alone could not achieve. LG CNS is also nurturing mathematical optimization talent and its ecosystem through optimization forums, competitions and industry-linked university programs while envisioning a future in which the field of mathematical optimization expands through integration with agentic AI, physical AI and quantum computing.

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A factory of a major air conditioner manufacturer in Korea had a long-standing headache. Air conditioners are shipped as "sets" of indoor and outdoor units. However, the production speed and timing of the two lines rarely matched. When one side was produced quickly, the other could not keep up and products that could not find their match were sent to the warehouse for the time being. For every 100 units produced, 70 passed through the warehouse. Storage costs, inventory turnover, cash conversion…. Invisible costs kept leaking out. The solution LG CNS consultants devised to solve the client’s problem was "mathematical optimization." They did not expand factory lines or bring in new equipment. LG CNS mathematically modeled process data and simultaneously optimized the production sequence and volume of indoor and outdoor units. As a result, the volume passing through the warehouse fell from 70 units to 30. Inventory was reduced by about 57% and annual costs fell by hundreds of millions of won. Nothing new was purchased. The only thing that changed was the way the company decided "what to produce and in what order."

This is the kind of scene "Mathematical Optimization" creates at industrial sites. Mathematical optimization is a technique that mathematically finds the best answer among numerous options under given constraints. Through mathematical optimization, LG CNS has spent the past nine years creating changes that reduce corporate costs and increase efficiency without adding new facilities or personnel. LG CNS’ optimization consulting, which began in 2017 as a pilot project with three to four consultants, has grown into Korea’s largest dedicated "mathematical optimization" organization, with about 50 master’s and doctoral-level optimization consultants. LG CNS is the only IT consulting company in Korea with a dedicated mathematical optimization organization that takes responsibility for the entire process, from defining a client’s problem to developing and verifying an optimization engine and building a system. Its accumulated project references now total more than 200. The organization has not recorded a single project failure.

Why has LG CNS chosen mathematical optimization and focused on it as a tool for solving corporate problems at a time when AI is gaining attention? Sohn Moo-sung, head of optimization consulting at LG CNS, said, "If AI, represented by machine learning (ML), finds latent patterns in vast amounts of data and predicts the future, mathematical optimization (MO) is about quickly finding the most advantageous option at present among numerous choices." DBR interviewed Sohn to hear about LG CNS’ journey to becoming Korea’s only consulting firm specializing in mathematical optimization and its optimization know-how.

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