Sofiane Soualah
Operations Planning & Optimization Consultant
I help organizations delivering public services (home care, healthcare, waste collection, transportation) plan their vehicle routes, staff schedules, and resource allocation more effectively, so they can better serve the people who depend on them.
In these sectors, contracts are won on price and lost in the field. Planning too tightly costs something other than money: a workload shifted onto an already overloaded team, a shift nobody wants to take, an elderly person cared for by a different aide every week. These costs don't show up in the budget being optimized, but they end up paid elsewhere and later: turnover, absenteeism, overtime, complaints.
Using operations research and machine learning, I translate business and service-quality constraints into measurable mathematical models, then search for the margin that only appears when the whole system is optimized at once.
Main expertise
Realistic optimization
Delivering coherent, realistic plans that are easy to adopt in the field, the way an experienced human planner would, but with the analytical and computing power of a machine. Saving a few dollars on paper is worth nothing if the plan forces a truck into a risky U-turn or constantly changes the aide assigned to an elderly person. An optimization is only worth something if it holds up in the field.
Vehicle routing
Routing under time-window, capacity, and precedence constraints.
Staff scheduling
Schedule design for operators and field workers.
Resource allocation
Fleet, equipment, and workforce sizing. Strategic location of infrastructure and facilities across the territory.
Sectors
Public services
Support ranging from public and municipal bodies to social economy enterprises (cooperatives, nonprofits, home care social economy enterprises), through to private companies when they operate a service or an infrastructure of public interest. Engagement ahead of a public tender or during ongoing operations, wherever cost and service quality have to be reconciled in the field.
Transport & logistics
Freight transportation, staff shuttles, distribution between facilities (CLSCs, hospitals, etc.). Route construction, workload balancing across vehicles, meeting promised time windows, driver schedules.
Healthcare and home care
Nurse, technician, and home-care worker routes. Client-to-worker assignment, weekly schedule building, absence and replacement management.
Waste collection
Schedule and circuit design for residential and bulky-waste collection. Territory zoning, truck sizing and assignment, tonnage forecasting, and on-demand collection integration.
Service offering
3 independent services
I embed in your team and observe your operations from the inside to understand how decisions are made, what your tools already do well, and what your teams still have to patch or correct in the field. The improvement potential is then measured on your own data. What comes next is decided in light of the results.
Operational diagnostic
Embedding in your operations to capture constraints, flows, exceptions, and pain points that are poorly or not documented at all. Analysis of the tools and data already in place, and of what they don't cover.
Deliverable
A quantified picture of your current performance, your blind spots, and the decisions where better support could make a difference.
Proof of value
Replaying past decisions with optimization models and comparing scenarios against your historical data. Measuring the gap between what was done and what was achievable, in service quality, capacity, resource utilization, and resilience to disruptions.
Deliverable
A quantified comparison of scenarios, the improvement potential, and the conditions needed to reach it.
Implementation
Once the potential is demonstrated, we define together what comes next: adjusting your processes, a decision support tool, or a more structured project depending on the scale. The scope and the partners required are determined at that point, based on what the diagnostic and the proof of value have revealed.
Deliverable
To be defined based on the agreed scope.
When can I help?
If any of these situations apply to you...
- You are preparing a bid for a public tender where the balance between cost and service quality is important in the evaluation.
- Your service-quality commitments are written into the specifications, but nothing in your planning actually guarantees they'll hold.
- Your optimized plans get hand-edited, bypassed, or patched the moment they reach the field.
- Constraints that matter are hard to express in your tools: continuity of care, team stability, preferences, real workload.
- The workload shifted onto your teams shows up nowhere in the budget, but it gets paid in turnover, absenteeism, overtime and complaints.
- You suspect there's still margin to be found, but every sector, every team and every contract is planned separately.
About
An applied mathematics enthusiast, I spent 11 years at GIRO designing public transit planning algorithms deployed in over 30 countries.
Today, I work independently to put my experience and expertise at the service of organizations with a public interest mission (waste collection, transportation, healthcare, home care).
See my background →Let's stay in touch
Tell me about your needs and the planning challenge you would like to solve.