Austin Chapter of INFORMS General Meeting


When September 20, 2001 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Where The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business (also called GSB)
Corner of Speedway and 21st Street (across from the main library and Gregory Gym)
Room GSB 3.104
Feature Leon S. Lasdon, PhD, Professor, University of Texas at Austin; Timothy L. Smith, MS, Research Scientist, Trajecta, Inc.

General Information

6:30 - 7:00 Refreshments and Networking
7:00 - 8:30 Predictive Modeling and Robust Optimization in CRM

Customer acquisition, customer retention, dynamic pricing and cross-selling are all customer relationship management (CRM) problems that lend themselves
to solution via optimization. What individual offers should a business give to each of their prospects in order to build a portfolio of customers that is profitable over the long-term and also satisfies near-term operating constraints? How can you use optimization to find the right product and price for each of your customers? That is the challenge of one-to-one marketing. In this session, Lasdon and Smith will show how one vendor uses data mining and predictive modeling to generate financial metrics that feed a robust optimization model for CRM problems. These methods are appropriate whenever customer data exists to support predictive modeling of key customer behaviors such as purchases, payments, cancellations and charge-offs. The focus in this talk will be on CRM projects that optimize credit card
portfolio management for American banks.  There will also be a demo of Trajecta's Virdix optimization software.

Parking

After 5:45 pm certain free parking becomes available on campus and the driving restrictions to the campus interior are lifted.  There is also a UT parking
garage at Speedway and MLK.