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RFI, RFP and RFQ madness in supply chain (May 11, 2023)

Over the years, Lokad has gained some notoriety, and we have earned the privilege of being part of an increasingly large number of RFI (request for information), RFP (request for proposal) and RFP (request for quote) related to supply chain optimization.

The maintenance of the optimization (Apr 17, 2023)

Lokad offers a flat monthly fee for software and expert services, ensuring optimal supply chain performance. Traditional optimization software fails due to inadequate maintenance. Lokad's supply chain scientists maintain automation, requiring ongoing engineering resources to prevent reverting to inefficient spreadsheet management.

Let’s try Lokad (Mar 27, 2023)

The engineering teams at Lokad have spent the last decade refining _Envision_, a specialized programming language dedicated to the predictive optimization of supply chains. As it turns out, most supply chain optimization challenges are, well, _weird_ (for a lack of a better word) and mainstream software technologies fall flat on their faces when confronted with such challenges.

The role of IT (Mar 6, 2023)

In many, probably most, large companies operating a supply chain, the IT department has years of backlog. The backlog is made of a myriad of glitches, inconsistencies, or fragilities that could be fixed but aren’t. Besides creating vast bureaucratic overheads, this endless series of pointless annoyances demotivates everyone.

Stochastic gradient descent with gradient estimator for categorical features (Feb 6, 2023)

The broad field of machine learning (ML) provides a wide array of techniques and methods that cover numerous situations. Supply chain, however, comes with its own specific set of data challenges, and sometimes aspects that might be deemed “basic” by supply chain practitioners do not benefit from satisfying ML instruments – at least according to our standards.

LokadTV reaches 6000 subscribers (Jan 19, 2023)

Almost exactly 18 months ago, I wrote a post to celebrate passing 3,000 subscribers on LokadTV. That post, in fact, was written almost 18 months after we celebrated passing 1,000 subscribers. Curiously enough, we passed 1000 subscribers about 18 months after we began actively promoting the channel.

On noise, NPCs, chatbots, and supply chain (Dec 26, 2022)

The state of supply chain communication is dismal. By way of anecdotal evidence, for the last couple of months, my daily morning routine consists of attempting to find one post – just one – that qualifies as _worthy of interest_ to an audience of supply chain minded people – in order to have it shared on news.lokad.com. This seemingly simple exercise proves exceedingly difficult. Most days, I do not succeed.

Supply chain resilience requires bandwidth (Dec 1, 2022)

The last couple of years haven’t been kind to supply chains. In fact, the only thing that hasn’t been in short supply appears to be forces of disruption':' lockdowns, wars, inflation, etc. As a result, a newfound interest in ‘resilient’ supply chains has emerged.

Pitfalls of supply chain for aeronautics (Sep 27, 2022)

Aeronautics companies are fundamentally risk adverse – for very good reasons – and this reflects in the management of the companies’ activity in every area. However, this mentality can be a hindrance when it comes to supply chain, as avoiding risk and not integrating the very concept of risk at the heart of the supply chain means losing sight of what you are optimizing.

Differentiating Relational Queries (Sep 21, 2022)

Supply chain data present themselves almost exclusively as relational data such as orders, clients, suppliers, products, etc. Those data are collected through the business systems - the ERP, the CRM, the WMS - that are used to operate the company.

Reproducible Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent (Sep 6, 2022)

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most successful techniques ever devised for both machine learning and mathematical optimization. Lokad has been extensively exploiting the SGD for years for supply chain purposes, mostly through differentiable programming. Most of our clients have a least one SGD somewhere in their data pipeline.

Launching Supply Chain News (Aug 24, 2022)

The ambition of news.lokad.com is to create a vibrant online community. No terms to accept, no forced login, no ads, no monetization plan, just a plain discussion text-based board, with a voting system to let the most interesting contributions surface.

Forecasting Climate Change like a Supply Chain Planner (Jun 13, 2022)

Transcript of the talk given by Joannes Vermorel at the Ecole polytechnique in Palaiseau (France) on Friday, June 3rd for the symposium 'Artificial Intelligence, Digital and Climate Change'.

Grand experiment on the TCO of a supply chain software (Feb 21, 2022)

The price tag of a piece of software ranges from nothing, as it happens with open source, to quite a lot - enterprise software leaning heavily towards the latter. However, operating a piece of software always involves some degree of overhead. The notion of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) precisely tries to capture the cost in full, taking into account both direct and indirect costs.

Control and bureaucracies in Supply Chains (Feb 14, 2022)

Over the years, it has become increasingly frustrating to witness that most companies seeking to improve their supply chain performance are setting themselves up for failure through their own RFP (request for proposals) and RFQ (request for quotes) processes.

How many people does it take to change a supply chain light bulb? (Dec 13, 2021)

Supply chains involve a patchwork of enterprise software. These software layers have been gradually, and sometimes haphazardly, rolled out over the last four decades. The venerable EDI (Electronic data interchange) may sit next to a blockchain prototype.

Envision VM (part 4), Distributed Execution (Dec 6, 2021)

The previous articles mostly examined how individual workers executed Envision scripts. However, both for resilience and for performance, Envision is actually executed across a cluster of machines.

Envision VM (part 3), Atoms and Data Storage (Nov 29, 2021)

During execution, thunks read input data and write output data, often in large quantities. How to preserve this data from the moment it is created and until it is used (part of the answer is on NVMe drives spread over several machines), and how to minimize the amount of data that goes through channels slower than RAM (network and persistent storage).

Envision VM (part 2), Thunks and the Execution Model (Nov 22, 2021)

Like most other parallel execution systems, Envision produces a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where each node represents an operation that needs to be performed, and each edge represents a data dependency where the downstream node needs the output of the upstream node in order to run.

Envision VM (part 1), Environment and General Architecture (Nov 15, 2021)

A Supply Chain Optimization pipeline covers a wide range of data processing needs':' data ingestion and augmentation, feature extraction, probabilistic forecasting, producing optimal decisions under constraints, data exports, analytics, and dashboard creation.

Beyond time-series (Oct 19, 2021)

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hammer long favored by the supply chain community has been time-series and, as a result, in supply chain circles all problems look like time-series forecasts. The hammering temptation is compounded by the extensive literature that exists on time-series forecasting beyond supply chain use cases.

Incrementalism is the bane of supply chains (Sep 20, 2021)

Incrementalism in supply chain includes improving the forecasting accuracy, improving the service level, reducing the stock level, reducing the lead time. Despite its prevalence among large companies, this approach rarely yields any tangible benefit.

Supply Chain as a Service (Jul 28, 2021)

In terms of predictive optimization, most supply chains are stuck in the early 1990s. As we started to address the root cause of predictive optimization failures, Supply Chain as a Service emerged as our business model.

Tidbits of supply chain terminology (Jun 29, 2021)

The emergence of a terminology is, at best, a haphazard process. Supply chain is no exception and, in hindsight, a sizeable portion of supply chain terminology is inadequate. Confusing terminology hurts newcomers and seasoned practitioners alike. Newcomers struggle more than they should with accidental complexity. Practitioners may not realize that the premise of their field ismore shaky than it appears.

How many SKUs should a demand planner manage? (Jun 10, 2021)

Lokad employs a team of around 30 supply chain scientists. The scientist is responsible for the data pipeline, the forecasts, the economic modelling and the end-game decisions. But how many SKUs do they manage?

LokadTV reaches 3000 subscribers (Jun 3, 2021)

18 months ago, LokadTV had reached 1000 subscribers. Since that time, our audience has now tripled reaching 3000 subscribers. We remain committed to bringing topics of genuine interest to the supply chain community.

Why FTP instead of REST (May 7, 2021)

Most web apps feature web APIs styled as REST, yet Lokad features FTPS and SFTP, which may appear surprising. However, this choice is intentional, why did Lokad choose to go this route?

Supply Chain Story: The Bullwhip Job (Apr 16, 2021)

My first professional supply chain experience happened back in 2004. At the time, I was a computer science student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), a university in Paris. My interests covered a wide range of wholly theoretical subjects, yet, I was also intrigued by the idea of testing out those theories “in the wild”.

The Adventures of Captain Obvious in Supply Chain (Feb 23, 2021)

Captain Obvious has been working overtime in supply chain. His natural leadership has inspired many who are now following the same path. Yet, underneath the uniform, there is little to be found but a great deal of confusion.

42 tricks to achieve Supply Chain greatness (Jan 26, 2021)

Many domains are complex, irredemiably so, and supply chain is certainly one of them. So what could an itemized list of tricks help you to achieve?

On the accidental complexity of supply chain systems (Dec 21, 2020)

A single smartphone could technically run a predictive inventory allocation for a very large retail network, yet why do so many companies have such slow systems in place?

Supply Chain Lectures, but why? (Nov 20, 2020)

I would like to share some insights into my motivations, as a CEO, for undertaking such a series of supply chain lectures. It boils down to the four key challenges faced by Lokad.