Category: Supply Chain Management
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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 percent, far more than paying for a smarter model did.
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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.
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S&OP: Everyone Signed Off on the Number. It Was Still Wrong by 8.2%.
A consensus forecast measures agreement, not truth. Here is what a textbook S&OP cycle looks like, why the signed-off number still ran 8.2% high, and the four moves that fix it without a full process overhaul.
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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.
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I Gave an AI Agent the Reorder Button: It Rebuilt the Bullwhip in 250 Days
An AI agent with the reorder button hit ~100% fill rate and looked like a star. Then I measured what it dumped on its suppliers.
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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 reading list for your role.
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The Folly of Forecasting
From the Pythia at Delphi to Google’s GraphCast — humans have always demanded the future. Why some forecasts have gotten dramatically better, why others haven’t, and why AI will not deliver the silver bullet.