Our background over the last 15 years has covered a wide range of practical implementations of real systems for real organisations to help them get more out of their resources. These range from short-term issues such as scheduling in manufacturing or service industries through to long-term planning problems covering up to ten years forward planning. The problems cover many areas such as manufacturing scheduling, maintenance scheduling, engineer scheduling, rostering, sequencing, load planning, vehicle routing, portfolio planning and many others. These systems have been deployed for customers in many industries including aerospace, metals, defence, finance and telecoms.