Biloxi-based company assists businesses with technical support
Optimal Answers, an innovative software company based in Biloxi, is offering an easy-to-use product tailored to help businesses, government agencies and individual users reach the best decisions or solutions possible and save them money.
“What we have done is create a product that enables decision optimization for virtually any type of business or government entity, and for most any type of problem that needs to be solved,” said Optimal Answers founder and CEO Brient Mayfield.
Mayfield also co-founded 13-30 Corporation, the predecessor to Whittle Communications. He has a bachelor’s degree in Dairy Manufacturing from The University of Tennessee. His career includes more than 40 years in the dairy industry, advertising and media, and computer hardware and software technology. His technology companies developed computer systems for food product formulation, process control, financial management and route optimization.
Optimization technology for decision support has generally focused on one type of problem such as routing vehicles or procurement for specific markets such as shipping, Mayfield said.
“In effect what we are doing is reinventing the way that common decisions are made by using optimization technology,” he said. “It’s one product that solves many problems.”
The Optimal technology has thousands of users all over the world who are receiving decision support for solving problems involving billions of dollars or even selecting Christmas presents based on a user’s budget and shopping list.
The city of Pass Christian is using Optimal software to establish routes for its school buses. “With this technology we’re going to be able to help the school administration to better organize the pickup of the students as well as returning them home by optimizing the routes the buses will take,” said Mayfield.
Typically Optimal’s digital optimization solutions result in savings that can range from five to 10 percent, and often the amount is “much more,” said Mayfield.
“Those savings are measurable, there’s no ambiguity about them,” he said. A customer such as a restaurant owner “is able to look at what they would have done using their manual approaches or just guessing and compare it to what they can do using Optimal and the difference is money they can put in the bank.”
Customers don’t have to have any tech background or experience to use the cloud-based application, which is available by a subscription.” We have applications that are sold for as little as $80 a month,” said Mayfield. More sophisticated applications for certain industries can cost as much as $35,000 a year.
The sophisticated optimization technology uses linear programming which Optimal said is considered the most powerful of all quantitative decision support methods.
The company is “100 percent focused” on its decision optimization product, as opposed to dozens, hundreds are even thousands of products at a much larger company.
“We feel like we can achieve the goal of helping people make better decisions in business, government and their personal lives with that type of focus,” said Mayfield.
Optimal’s core products are designed for inventory management and procurement, product mix and pricing, planning and scheduling and assignment and selection.
Mayfield’s goal for Optimal is to develop a family of decision optimization applications to apply to common problems in business, government and for individuals in their daily lives. Customers could save money, increase profit and “enjoy greater fulfillment and/or satisfaction,” according to the company.
Optimal employs contract employees in Mississippi and throughout the country.
In addition to assisting Optimal customers, Mayfield said his company could generate high-tech jobs, attract investments and help create a tech hub in Mississippi. Mayfield intends to build a headquarters for his virtual business on the Mississippi Coast.
“It could be a really big deal, not just in terms of a software company, but for Mississippi as well,” said Mayfield. “This is different from the typical type of business that the state recruits and ends up actually moving here.”