As part of ARC Advisory Group’s Supply Chain Forum last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Kathleen Geraghty, Vice President of North American Sales at ToolsGroup. During our conversation, we touched on a number of topics around the supply chain planning market. You can watch also the full interview below. Specifically, I asked […]
Machine learning has been successfully applied to demand planning, but leading suppliers of supply chain planning are beginning to work on using machine learning to improve supply planning. But architecturally and culturally, this is a much tougher problem than machine learning applied to demand planning.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is hot. Over $4 billion in venture capital has been invested in AI firms just in the US. But supply chain planning software companies, with their cadre of operations research Ph.Ds who have been modeling complex problems for decades, may be better poised to solve many complex business problems than the hot new Silicon Valley firms.
If “the forecast is always wrong,” is improving forecast accuracy even the solution to our demand planning woes? In times that continue to defy our ability to predict them, the words of famous statistician George Box have never been more right: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So what can we do to […]
Ferguson PLC, value added distributor of plumbing and heating products, came out with their third quarter results on June 14th. In the nine months ending April 30th they generated over $20 billion in revenues, grew by 27 per cent, and generated three quarters of a billion in operating profit. Despite their size, few people outside […]
We’ve only just entered the second half of the year and people haven’t even taken their summer vacations yet, so why are we talking about holiday supply chains now? Last year, retailers started encouraging holiday shoppers to shop early. As a result, the holiday season got front loaded sometime in September. Given the challenges we’ve […]
Malcolm McLean, a trucker from North Carolina, was tired of waiting. He had a load full of cotton bales, and while idling away hours at a shipyard watching stevedores load other cargo onto ships he dreamed up containers that transformed global supply chains. Loading and unloading trucks was inefficient, so his frustration led to the […]
My recent conversations with the supply chain practitioners are dominated by supply chain risk — specifically geopolitical risks in light of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even companies that serve markets and rely on supply chains that are not directly affected by the conflict are starting to feel the effects of the war. Some […]
A large multinational is undergoing an impressive supply chain transformation that will run through 2023. While the company has several different goals, two key focuses are improved agility and resilience, and more autonomous planning. A Complex Supply Chain This is a public, multinational providing different types of electronic and machinery products for different industries. Their […]
Many large enterprises use one form or another of a supply chain application to help manage their supply chains. Supply chain vendors have been touting their investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for the last several years. In the course of updating our annual research on the supply chain planning market, I talked to executives across […]
