Book excerpt: Today many organizations face challenges when developing a realistic plan or schedule that provides the best possible balance between customer service and revenue goals. Optimization technology has long been used to find the best solutions to complex planning and scheduling problems. A decision-support environment that enables the flexible exploration of all the trade-offs and sensitivities needs to provide the following capabilities: Flexibility to develop and compare realistic planning and scheduling scenarios Quality sensitivity analysis and explanations Collaborative planning and scenario sharing Decision recommendations This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces you to the IBM ILOG® Optimization Decision Manager (ODM) Enterprise. This decision-support application provides the capabilities you need to take full advantage of optimization technology. Applications built with IBM ILOG ODM Enterprise can help users create, compare, and understand planning or scheduling scenarios. They can also adjust any of the model inputs or goals, and fully understanding the binding constraints, trade-offs, sensitivities, and business options. This book enables business analysts, architects, and administrators to design and use their own operational decision management solution.