William D. Hammers

Summary

I am the President of Optimal Solutions, a company I formed in 1995 to provide consulting services for business and education. Located in Clearwater, Kansas, the company helps “organizations make informed strategic decisions and develops software products applying analysis techniques to business problems. The tools of decision support include computers, mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence.”

Prior to going with Optimal Solutions, I was a senior program manager in Operations with Cessna Aircraft Company, working with a team to solve problems associated with the manufacture of aircraft. My role was to gather data and extract information from the data for use in making informed decisions. The data mining tools I used included statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, multi-criteria decision support, neural networks, generic algorithms, and fuzzy logic along with the information presentation tools of simulation, risk analysis, and expert systems.

My work at Cessna led me to start my own company to provide decision support consulting services and my mathematics training provided the background I needed. Mathematics plays an important role in the business of manufacturing. Multiple mathematical tools are used daily to model critical business functions which support the manufacturing environment.

Two areas of artificial intelligence, expert systems and neural networks, are particularly important to my work with industry. Expert Systems provide the analyst with a new class of tools to attack problems whose solution requires intuition, judgment, and logical inferences, as well as facts. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) also add a different dimension to the analyst's toolbox.