Saggezza - Best Technical Support Solution

Company: Saggezza, Chicago, IL
Entry Submitted By: Propllr
Company Description: Saggezza combines software development, implementation expertise, and data analytics to help businesses make better data-driven decisions and improve client interaction, engagement, satisfaction, revenue and profitability. With more than 700 consultants across three continents, Saggezza works to create innovative, operational cultures for companies all over the world.
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Technical Support Solution - Computer Technologies

Nomination Title: Saggezza leverages AI to help large printing company LSC Communications' customers save $70 million per year in shipping costs

LSC Communications, a printing company with 16,000 staff, 35 printing facilities, and three warehouses, is responsible for delivering 6 billion pieces of mail every year across the U.S. – from newspapers and magazines to bills and credit statements. LSC realized that shipping costs accounted for a large portion of the company’s expenses, exceeding its total printing costs. That’s a steep price for an industry where margins are already razor thin.

LSC knew it had to act quickly to reduce that. To lower postage costs, the company allows customers to join a cooperative mail program. The program allows the company to package participating customers’ orders together to efficiently distribute workloads across the company’s infrastructure. Reducing the postal costs through the cooperative mailing program would not only lead to large savings, but it would alsohelp the company attract new customers through competitively low fees.

LSC primarily worked with one third-party postal service to deliver materials to customers since the vendor would provide discounts for presorted bulk mail. Each week the company was tasked with determining how to configure its packaging equipment to create bundles that net the most savings from the postal service provider.

The challenge the company faced was the fact that there was an astronomical number of ways to configure its packaging equipment. The sheer number of possibilities made it bafflingly difficult to come up with an optimal configuration on time. That’s when LSC Communications approached global IT consulting firm Saggezza to solve this complex business problem.

Saggezza knew this problem was perfectly suited for a technology like artificial intelligence (AI) to solve. The consulting firm was tasked with (1) shrinking the number of possible configurations down to a smaller, workable set of optimal ones, and (2) selecting the best configuration from this smaller set given both equipment and timing constraints.

Saggezza got to work developing a custom machine learning solution (machine learning is a subset of AI technology). They knew that LSC’s data followed certain patterns. So, their solution used unsupervised learning algorithms to group find patterns in the data. These algorithms are great at finding unknown patterns in the data. In LSC’s case, these patterns represented equipment configurations that net large savings.

Eventually, the algorithms group mail into bundles that LSC could configure their packaging equipment to produce. The algorithms continue to work in tandem, feeding each other their outputs to optimize the solution even further. For example, one of the solution’s algorithms generates a set of configurations optimized for bulk discounts while another algorithm optimizes the configurations based on the delivery addresses of each piece of mail.

Saggezza’s solution saves consumers over $70 million each year by using machine learning to determine the equipment configurations that maximize savings. The solution can find an optimized configuration in fewer than 90 minutes.

Through these savings, the company can offer competitive fees for those who join the cooperative mail program, boosting client satisfaction, attracting new customers, and driving business growth.

-Artificial intelligence technology (called cluster AI) runs millions of possibilities through its algorithm to identify the best way to sort mail, minimize shipping costs, and achieve bulk shipping discounts.
-The technology is great at finding unknown patterns in data, meaning it is able to suggest configurations that a human likely never would have been able to find.
-The algorithms group mail into bundles that the company can quickly and easily configure their packaging equipment to produce.
-In total, consumers save over $70 million each year.