VISMA Optimization Technologies

We love challenging problems. And we love to solve them.

About Us

Visma has customers who struggle with some of the most challenging and complex mission-critical problems every single day. Our job is to find those customers, identify their problems and solve them. By dedicating ourselves to the latest research within optimization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we seek to significantly improve the operations of our customers within healthcare, education and the private sector.

By empowering clients with user-friendly, analytical tools in the cloud, we radically transform their manual processes into competitive advantages enabling them to make powerful and informed decisions.

How we work

As a member of the team, you will be responsible for creating cutting edge technology through commercializing ideas to products.

We believe that the success of applied optimization depends on domain knowledge and a deep understanding of the underlying business. That is why we operate in teams where each member takes part in the whole value chain of the project—from business process improvement to mathematical modeling, algorithm construction, full-stack development, and application hosting. We operate in teams of international, curious and devoted tech-talents.

In the creation of our optimization products, we work closely together with the end-users. In this way, the needs and preferences of our customers are integrated into the core of our solutions. This approach results in products the end-users love to use.

To stay updated on the latest technologies and research, we have frequent knowledge sharing and e-learning sessions. We also love to arrange hackathons to maintain the team’s innovative spirit and drive.

Projects

Route Optimization in Home Nursing Care

The lack of capacity in hospitals is growing. Patients receiving health treatment in their homes is becoming a new reality. This health treatment is done by the nurses in the home nursing care. Until 2019, almost every travel route for nurses in the home nursing care in Norway was manually planned. Planning these routes is an extremely difficult and complex task. Even for home nursing cares with only 3 nurses and 30 patients, the possible number of different and distinctive routes exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. Hence, manual routes made by hand are typically inefficient and of poor quality. At the end of Fall 2019, Visma Optimization Technologies launched Visma Flyt Route Planner - an application that helps the home nursing care to optimize their travel routes to patients. Techniques from Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research are utilized to allocate patients to nurses and determine the order in which each nurse should visit their allocated patients. In the future, more complex and advanced features like re-optimization and disruption management will be added to the Route Planner. In 2020 we will also look into the potential of taking the Route Planner to other markets such as mail, trash, and food delivery services.

Timetabling for schools

Making a school timetable for the year ahead is a time-consuming and frustrating process for people to do manually. There are so many moving parts - available rooms, competent teachers, free time slots, required subjects, and necessary subject hours to name a few - that it can be a daunting task to approach by hand. The InSchool project provides an automated timetabling solution that takes the onus of this work away from the user, saving them time and effort. The room allocator assigns lessons to rooms based on the required capacity and the type of class to be taught. The teacher allocator examines the competencies and preferences of teachers and distributes them among the classes required for each subject. The scheduler allocates lessons to time slots according to the constraints introduced by user requirements and capacity. The feasibility checker explores the underlying structure of the timetable configuration and reports back to the user on any set of conflicting requirements it can find that would make a timetable infeasible. The user then has the opportunity to change their setup to allow the allocators to find an optimal solution. The timetable solver for InSchool was first available to Akershus county in Norway for the 2019 timetabling season. For the 2020 season, the product will be rolled out to a larger selection of schools.

Kindergarten admission optimization

Each municipality in Norway is responsible for carrying out annual kindergarten admissions, with the goal of allocating children to preferred kindergartens. However, there are national, municipal and kindergarten-specific legislations that complicate the admission process. All legislation needs to be taken into account for the allocation to be acceptable. As a result, the problem is demanding to solve manually, and it often takes weeks and months to produce an allocation that satisfies the requirements and legislations. Also, the allocations produced are far from optimal and many children are not allocated to a desired kindergarten. To improve the admission process, Visma is developing the Kindergarten Admission Optimizer which applies techniques from Operation Research to create an optimal allocation of children to kindergartens within seconds. The solver will make the kindergarten admission process more efficient. More time can, therefore, be allocated to develop learning resources in the kindergarten and maintain close contact with guardians. Also, the Admission Optimizer can be configured to ensure balanced age and gender distributions in the kindergartens, as well as minimizing the average traveling distance for the parents. The admission optimizer will be launched in 2020.

Workforce Management

For a business, hospital, factory or any other organization, scheduling employees to shifts in an efficient manner is critical when facing fluctuations in demand. The already tedious task of forecasting and meeting daily requirements of staff and competence is complicated further by laws, regulations and employees’ preferences. The result is a recurring, time-consuming and manual process that sometimes leads to inadequate and unfair schedules that might even be illegal. In the workforce management project, we have developed an optimization solver that, within minutes, optimizes shift allocation, thereby automating a large part of the workforce scheduling processes. The solver assists schedulers in creating fair and efficient schedules that adhere to laws and regulations. The solver will be launched as a module in the Medvind WFM Application in the Swedish market in Q1 2020. Later, adaptations will be made to reach the Norwegian and Finnish markets as well.

Join The Team

If you care about the societal impact of your work and possess the diverse set of skills needed to adequately solve complex, real-world problems, we are very interested in getting to know you. We look for high-skilled employees with a passion to challenge the status quo. If you have a background from optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, infrastructure, or cloud technology, we are interested in getting to know you.