Where SCM meets data science and AI.
Real-world methods for supply chain and operations management professionals who want to go beyond Excel — with reproducible code, realistic datasets, and techniques you can apply today.
Newest Entries
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Your Supplier Isn’t Offering a Discount. They’re Offering You 29.8%
The price-break EOQ math says buy 600 units instead of 87 and save $6,566 a year. Then a carrying rate above 29.8% flips the answer. Here are the three numbers no supplier quote contains.
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AI Model Distillation, Explained: The Compression Trick Behind the $589 Billion Monday
A single Chinese app knocked $589 billion off Nvidia in one day. The trick…
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I Raced Amazon’s Forecasting AI Against a 66-Year-Old Formula. The Formula Won.
I put Amazon’s zero-shot forecasting AI against five classical models on 148 real retail…
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Forecasting & Demand Planning
All 18 articles →-
I Raced Amazon’s Forecasting AI Against a 66-Year-Old Formula. The Formula Won.
I put Amazon’s zero-shot forecasting AI against five classical models on 148 real retail series. A formula from 1960 beat a 205-million-parameter model by 14 to 16%.
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Does Your Forecast Beat a Sticky Note? The Placebo Test for Demand Planning
Your forecast has exactly one job: beat a sticky note that says ‘same as last year.’ Most don’t. Here’s the placebo test that proves it.
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30 Books Every Forecaster, Demand Planner, and S&OP Lead Should Read — The Inphronesys Bookshelf
An interactive 30-book bookshelf for forecasters, demand planners, S&OP leads, supply chain strategists, and the data scientists who keep them honest. Filter by category and level, build a…
Supply Chain Operations
All 15 articles →-
I Let AI Agents Play a 5-Year Beer Game: Why Sharing Data Beat Buying a Smarter Model
I ran the classic Beer Game for 260 weeks with AI agents in the chairs. Giving the chain real customer demand cut in-game cost by up to 40…
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Your Exception Report Is Lying to You: How to Make ‘1% False Alarms’ Actually Mean 1%
A static ±3σ band promised 0.27% false alarms and delivered 3.80%. Here is how to turn your exception threshold from a statistics setting into an honest attention budget.
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Factory Physics: The Laws Your Factory Floor Already Obeys
Throughput, WIP, and cycle time aren’t three dials you can set independently. They’re bound by physics, and ignoring that costs you weeks of lead time.
Procurement & Sourcing
All 8 articles →-
Your Supplier Isn’t Offering a Discount. They’re Offering You 29.8%
The price-break EOQ math says buy 600 units instead of 87 and save $6,566 a year. Then a carrying rate above 29.8% flips the answer. Here are the…
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Sole Source: The $900k Median Problem Your Dual-Source Checkbox Won’t Fix
The dual-source flag teams buy to feel safe moves the median cost of a disruption about $44k. In the wrong direction. The dependency nobody flags moves it $474k.
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The Resilience Ladder: Why the Things You Buy to Feel Safe Don’t Save You
I pulled 3,000 disruptions to find what separates firms that survive a shock from firms that bleed. The dual-source checkbox wasn’t it.
Strategy & Leadership
All 14 articles →-
The Algorithm and the Skunk Works: It’s Latency, Not Size, That Kills Innovation
Kelly Johnson built jets in a tent in 143 days. Sixty years later Elon Musk landed rockets with almost the same rulebook. Neither copied the other, and the…
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Four Masters, One Boardroom: A 2,500-Year Operating System for Strategy
Four dead strategists, one boardroom, roughly 2,500 years of canon. Here is the four-layer model that stacks them, and the verified reading list to build it yourself.
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Of the Fox and the Lion: Coercion, Cunning, and Modern Power
Machiavelli’s Chapter 17 and 18 are routinely misread. Force without cunning is brittle. Bonds of love break under stress. Here is what actually holds.
AI & Data Science
All 15 articles →-
AI Model Distillation, Explained: The Compression Trick Behind the $589 Billion Monday
A single Chinese app knocked $589 billion off Nvidia in one day. The trick behind the panic has a boring name and a fascinating story.
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A 3-Point Gap and a 42x Price Cut: The Open-Weight AI Landscape, July 2026
The best open-weight model now trails the closed frontier by three points of measured intelligence and costs a third of the price. For anyone routing thousands of tasks…
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GLM-5.2 and the Benchmark Trap: How One Score Becomes Two Headlines
A Chinese open-weight model just topped the leaderboards and undercut GPT-5.5 on price by 7x. Then the benchmark tables started disagreeing with each other.