Creating the Warehouse of the Future
Supply chain issues as a topic of dinner conversation? It’s probably not what anyone would have suspected just a few years ago. But over the last few years, stories of supply chain shortages and delays have become part of nightly news and national media outlets….
How To Fix Mean Absolute Error, Part 1
The deceiving surprises that Mean Absolute Error hides from us Executive summary Mean Absolute Error is the first choice for practitioners when it comes to evaluate their model, owing to its simple definition and its intuitive business relevance. The evaluation metric Ranked Probability Score, by…
Story Points Paradox
I have been an Agile enthusiast and a flag bearer for Agile methodologies for more than a decade now. Having worked with multiple IT giants and market leaders in the technology industry, I have had my share of opportunities to work in different project management…
Navigating the Perfect Storm: Automotive CEOs Focus on Strategies to Counter Inflation and Enable Supply Chain Resiliency
The automotive sector has switched lanes into a new digital world, where the pace of change is also hurtling manufacturers into oncoming traffic in the form of geopolitical, economic and natural crises. This mix of an increase in data volume, velocity and frequency; evolving customer…
Supply Chain Risk Is Inevitable. The Key Is Understanding and Mitigating It via AI.
Supply Chain Disruption In a series of blog articles, the Product/Solution Marketing team explores innovative solutions to guard against supply chain disruptions. Our personal and professional lives are filled with risk. Every day, we can take actions that mitigate that risk — or we can…
Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) Has Served Its Duty and Should Now Retire
Executive summary According to Gartner (2018 Gartner Sales & Operations Planning Success Survey), the most popular evaluation metric for forecasts in Sales and Operations Planning is Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). This needs to change. Modern forecasts concern small quantities on a disaggregated level such…
Forecasting Few Is Different, Part 2
This is a two-part story by Malte Tichy about dealing with sales forecasts that concern fast-moving as well as slow-moving items. Find Part 1 here. How precise can a sales forecast become? The mechanism of fluctuation cancellation ensures that granular low-scale-forecasts are more imprecise, noisy…
Forecasting Few Is Different, Part 1
When dealing with sales forecasts that concern fast-moving as well as slow-moving items, we must account for the non-proportional scaling of relative forecast uncertainty with selling rates, which largely determines the achievable level of precision. Executive summary For the same forecast quality, predictions for slow-moving…
Blue Yonder Named a Leader in WFM Technology
Workforce remains top of mind for business leaders because it’s become clear that there’s no end in sight for today’s labor challenges. There are more than 11 million job openings in the United States, and 35% of businesses are experiencing unsustainable turnover rates between 11%…
Three Keys for 4PL Success
This is part 2 of 3 article on the topic of “How 4PL Services Can Help Up the Game in the Omni-Channel World.» As I discussed in my last blog post, the pandemic has driven dramatic growth for fourth-party logistics (4PL) providers. As the world’s…