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Real-time data exploration with slices
Two months ago, we rolled out a major new feature for Lokad: our first bit of real-time data exploration. This feature is codenamed dashboard slicing, and it took us a complete overhaul of the...
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An algebra for supply chain economics
The first principle of our Quantitative Supply Chain manifesto states that all futures should be considered. Thus, we expanded Envision two years ago to natively work with random variables. This...
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A numerical take on DDMRP
DDMRP stands for Demand Driven Material Requirements Planning. In the last few years, the popularity of DDMRP has been growing in certain industries; occupying the niche that lean manufacturing or six...
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Differentiable Programming as in 'AI' that works
We are proud to announce the immediate availability of the Lokad private beta for differentiable programming intended for quantitative supply chain optimization. Differentiable programming is the...
View ArticleIntegers and uncertainty in differentiable programming
Markus Leopoldseder (Director of Knowledge - Global Manufacturing and Supply Chain Practice at McKinsey) raised two relevant questions concerning the applicability of Differentiable Programming (DP)...
View ArticleHumans in modern supply chains
Supply chains are complex systems, possibly among the most complex ones ever engineered by mankind, encompassing people (many), machines (diverse) and software (tons).
View ArticleA manufacturer's perspective
A few days ago, a prospect raised several sharp questions concerning the applicability of the Quantitative Supply Chain perspective to address the supply chain challenges as faced by many large...
View ArticleForecasting as a self-fulfilling prophecy
Every single week, a number of companies contact us asking whether Lokad could take care of their rolling weekly or monthly forecasts, say a few quarters ahead.
View ArticleLokadTV reaches 1000 subscribers
Just over a year and a half ago we embarked on the ambitious challenge of starting a video channel dedicated to the world of supply chains.
View ArticleWhy not Python
Years ago, but also years after founding Lokad, I realized that no single app would ever deliver anything close to greatness as far as supply chain optimization was concerned.
View ArticleQuantitative SCM vs Classic APS
While supply chains got an early start at digitalization back in the 80’s and 90’s with electronic inventory management and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), many software vendors - and thus most of...
View ArticleRanked 6th out of 909 teams in the M5 forecasting competition
A team of Lokad employees, namely Rafael de Rezende (leader), Ignacio Marín Eiroa, Katharina Egert and Guilherme Thompson 1, have come in 6th position in the M5 Forecasting competition out of 909...
View ArticleFactors of success in predictive supply chains
Having supply chains on autopilot through predictive technologies and achieving above human performance at scale remains a distant goal for nearly all companies, except the usual suspects (e.
View ArticleRefresh everything every day
Lokad’s supply chain practice is to refresh all the data pipelines - forecasts included - at least once a day, even when dealing with monthly or quarterly calculations.
View ArticleSupply Chain Lectures, but why?
Last week, I announced that I will be starting a series of live Supply Chain lectures (register here for the first session).
View ArticleOn the accidental complexity of supply chain systems
Modern computing hardware is extremely capable. A modest smartphone delivers billions of FLOPS (floating point operations per second) while storing hundreds of gigabytes of data.
View Article42 tricks to achieve Supply Chain greatness
Would you trust an authority who happens to be routinely publishing materials such as:
View ArticleThe Adventures of Captain Obvious in Supply Chain
Captain Obvious has been working overtime in supply chain. His natural leadership has inspired many who are now following the same path.
View ArticleWhy FTP instead of REST
The Lokad platform is geared toward terabyte-scale data processing and intended for predictive supply chain optimization.
View ArticleLokadTV reaches 3000 subscribers
18 months ago, LokadTV had reached 1000 subscribers. Since that time, our audience has now tripled reaching 3000 subscribers.
View ArticleHow many SKUs should a demand planner manage?
In short: 100,000+ SKUs per planner. Lokad employs a team of ≈30 supply chain scientists (and it’s growing).
View ArticleTidbits of supply chain terminology
The emergence of a terminology is, at best, a haphazard process.
View ArticleSupply Chain as a Service
In terms of predictive optimization, most supply chains are stuck in the early 1990s1.
View ArticleIncrementalism is the bane of supply chains
One of the surest paths to failure in supply chain management is the “learn to walk before you run” mindset.
View ArticleEnvision VM (part 1), Environment and General Architecture
This article is the first of a four-part series on the Envision virtual machine’s inner workings: the software that runs Envision scripts.
View ArticleEnvision VM (part 2), Thunks and the Execution Model
This article is the second of a four-part series on the Envision virtual machine’s inner workings: the software that runs Envision scripts.
View ArticleEnvision VM (part 3), Atoms and Data Storage
This article is the third of a four-part series on the Envision virtual machine’s inner workings: the software that runs Envision scripts.
View ArticleEnvision VM (part 4), Distributed Execution
This article is the fourth of a four-part series on the Envision virtual machine’s inner workings: the software that runs Envision scripts.
View ArticleHow many people does it take to change a supply chain light bulb?
Supply chains involve a patchwork of enterprise software. These software layers have been gradually, and sometimes haphazardly, rolled out over the last four decades1.
View ArticleControl and bureaucracies in Supply Chains
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...
View ArticleGrand experiment on the TCO of a supply chain software
The price tag1 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.
View ArticleForecasting Climate Change like a Supply Chain Planner
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.
View ArticleFall in love with the problem, not the solution
Every single SKU calls for mundane daily decisions, such as moving in more stock or changing the underlying price tag.
View ArticleSupply Chain Story: The Bullwhip Job
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.
View ArticleLaunching Supply Chain News
What does it take for supply chains - as a whole - to progress?
View ArticleReproducible Parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most successful techniques ever devised for both machine learning and mathematical optimization.
View ArticleDifferentiating Relational Queries
Supply chain data present themselves almost exclusively as relational data: orders, clients, suppliers, products, etc.
View ArticlePitfalls of supply chain for aeronautics
Aeronautics companies are fundamentally risk adverse – for very good reasons – and this reflects in the management of the companies’ activity in every area.
View ArticleSupply chain resilience requires bandwidth
The last couple of years haven’t been kind to supply chains.
View ArticleOn noise, NPCs, chatbots, and supply chain
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...
View ArticleLokadTV reaches 6000 subscribers
Almost exactly 18 months ago, I wrote a post to celebrate passing 3,000 subscribers on LokadTV.
View ArticleStochastic gradient descent with gradient estimator for categorical features
The broad field of machine learning (ML) provides a wide array of techniques and methods that cover numerous situations.
View ArticleThe role of IT
In many, probably most, large companies operating a supply chain, the IT department has years of backlog.
View ArticleLet’s try Lokad
The engineering teams at Lokad have spent the last decade refining Envision, a specialized programming language dedicated to the predictive optimization of supply chains.
View ArticleThe maintenance of the optimization
The fees that Lokad charges to its enterprise clients are straightforward1: a flat monthly fee for a mix of software+experts2.
View ArticleRFI, RFP and RFQ madness in supply chain
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...
View ArticleLarge scale learning: a contribution to distributed asynchronous clustering...
Lokad’s first major breakthrough was the use of highly atypical types of forecasts for supply chain purposes, specifically quantile forecasts.
View ArticleClassification algorithms distributed on the cloud
Lokad’s first major disruption, after the project’s inception back in 2008, was the emergence of cloud computing.
View ArticleInventory management under the constraint of multi-reference minimal order...
Minimal order quantities (MOQs) are ubiquitous in supply chains. Every business that isn’t a retail specialist is very likely to impose an MOQ on anything it distributes.
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