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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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…
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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…
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Schwerpunkt: The Lost Art of Strategic Concentration
Most strategy decks are budget arithmetic dressed up as a plan. Clausewitz had a single word for what is actually happening — and a discipline for fixing it. The lost art of Schwerpunkt.
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Fog of War, Fog of Market: Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Clausewitz’s answer to uncertainty was not better data — it was better judgment. Two centuries later, most boards still demand certainty before authorising action, and most strategy windows close before the data is ready. This piece is about the qualities Clausewitz called coup d’oeil and Fingerspitzengefuehl, and what they mean when the dashboard is incomplete…
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Friction Is the Strategy: What Clausewitz Knew About Execution
Clausewitz’s 1832 concept of Reibung — friction — is not a complaint about execution. It is the structural diagnosis that strategy decks still refuse to internalise two centuries later. Any strategy that does not budget for friction is not a strategy; it is a wish.
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Win Without Fighting: The Supreme Art in Business Strategy
Sun Tzu’s most cited principle is also his most misread. Winning without fighting is not pacifism — it is raising the cost of opposition so high that conflict becomes irrational for the adversary.
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Shaping the Battlefield: Sun Tzu on Positioning Before Competition
Sun Tzu’s most underappreciated concept is shih (势) — the potential energy of a chosen position. The decisive act in strategy isn’t the fight, it’s the positioning that makes the fight unwinnable for the other side.
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Know Before You Move: Sun Tzu’s Intelligence Doctrine
Sun Tzu’s Chapter XIII is a 2,500-year-old empirical claim: foreknowledge cannot be deduced from inside the room. Most companies still get this wrong — and the failure rates are measurable.
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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.