A recent example of "knowing better optimisation experts" I know of in my local area are with garbage trucks. A expensive company was hired to optimize - yet they apparently forgot some real world factors, like with snow and ice not all the trucks can go everywhere, some roads too narrow, etc. with the result of chaos and the workers fighting succesfully to be allowed to continue influence their working schedule, they sucesfully managed without the external experts.
People do inefficient things. And they also do it for years, thinking it is a universal law. But usually an expert from the outside will still not know better how to do things.
https://www.kth.se/en/om/innovation/alumner/airmee-levererar...
Without involving the human planners, the project won't succeed. We're empowering them, with PlanningAI assistance, so they can focus on what they planning must do, for who, instead of how it gets there. So when the plan goes off the rails - 5 people call in sick - they can get it back on the rails in seconds with Real-Time Planning.
The engineering work is only half the work, or less. Fitting the technology into the human processes is another big chunk. Half of my videos on youtube deal with such cases: Continuous Planning, Real-Time Planning, Non-distruptive Replanning, Pinning, ... Not code, not technology, but design patterns.
And even then, this is far from 100% of the solution. Technology and education is still not enough.
That human planner with 30 years of business knowledge in his/her head is still a critical: he/she will always need to tweak, oversee and sometimes overrule the planning solution in production.
Still, it _is_ a good story, and plausible based on what I saw to be the state of the industry back then. Your run of the mill last-mile courier services were really badly organized, from the mathematics and optimization side as simple as they get, and ability to build a robust optimization transportation management system would've given serious competitive edge.
(edit: removed repeated words)
However I can tell you that this kind of thing really does happen. One of the injection molding conferences I attended had several presentations where companies were contemplating building more injection molding lines, but instead hired consultants (of course rolls eyes) to re-optimize their injection mold programs. After tweaking all the parameters in to speed up injection rates, it turned out the company had about 50% more capacity than they thought.
Now, I suspect this was shit management more than anything. I strongly suspect that the people on the line told their superiors that they needed to fix the programs and got ignored.
However, you couldn't sell anything to the management chain until they were staring at having to spend cash. Selling people on "saving money" is always super difficult as it requires them to change something that is nominally "working". Selling people on "not having to spend money they are staring at imminently" is always way easier. Obviously the easiest sell is "spend money to make a lot more money", but that doesn't happen all that often.