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 Demand Chart Hid a 132-Unit Problem. The FT’s Chart Rules Catch It
Four datasets can share the same summary statistics and still tell four different stories. So can your SKU history. Here is how to name the relationship in your data, pick the chart that fits it,…
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What Shape Is Your Plant? In Two of the Four, Your Bottleneck Lies
Every factory game teaches you the slowest machine sets the pace. None teach you…
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Six Times They Tried to Prove Sophistication Wins
Forty years of open forecasting competitions, and the winner’s margin over a dumb average…
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Forecasting & Demand Planning
All 18 articles →-
Six Times They Tried to Prove Sophistication Wins
Forty years of open forecasting competitions, and the winner’s margin over a dumb average stayed thin. Then M6 asked whether accuracy makes money. The correlation was 0.04.
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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 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.
Supply Chain Operations
All 15 articles →-
What Shape Is Your Plant? In Two of the Four, Your Bottleneck Lies
Every factory game teaches you the slowest machine sets the pace. None teach you that in a V-plant, the trunk can run at 100% and convert every unit…
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$9 Billion for Nothing: the Stealth AI Bet That Reaches Your Loading Dock
Six labs most supply chain professionals have never heard of have raised $15.56 billion. 58% of it went to two labs that have shipped nothing at all.
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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…
Procurement & Sourcing
All 8 articles →-
Four Kinds of Weird in Your Price File: EUR 43,017 of Negotiating Room
A supplier asked for 20.4%. The published indices supported 2.3%. Here is the R workbench that found the gap, and the three things it honestly could not find.
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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…
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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.
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 →-
Your Demand Chart Hid a 132-Unit Problem. The FT’s Chart Rules Catch It
Four datasets can share the same summary statistics and still tell four different stories. So can your SKU history. Here is how to name the relationship in your…
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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 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…