Over the weekend I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about two subjects that don’t normally come up in the same conversation: chocolate and operations research. Everyone knows about chocolate and many of us enjoy it as a tasty treat whenever we can. However, when I refer to operations research (OR) in a …
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Tag Archives: Operations Research
I recently went to a talk on Reinforcement Learning (RL) in my local .Net development group. I found the topic fascinating. For those not familiar with Reinforcement learning; it is a type of unsupervised machine learning where the algorithm uses real-world feedback over time to learn what to do. Instead of providing a set of …
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The Business of improving a Supply Chain is a similar experience to digging a French drain. My 1730 New England farmhouse sits a bit downhill from my driveway, and when it rains hard, or for long periods, the water will follow the slope from this watershed and make its way into my cellar. I have …
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Recently, I was reading the current issue of Cornell Engineering Magazine. In it, they had a profile of an alumnus named Howard Morgan. Mr. Morgan is a 1968 Ph.D. graduate of Cornell and a venture capitalist. You can read the article in Cornell Engineering Magazine here. One paragraph in particular struck me. It reads: “[Mr. …
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New technologies spring up each year, seemingly every day. There are new programming languages, frameworks, and processes. There are new personal productivity gadgets and apps. There are new internet connectivity method (routers, access points, bridges, cable modems, etc). It can all be pretty daunting if you think you need to stay ahead of all this …
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Profit Point’s recent article in Industry Today, “The Future of Supply Chain Network Design,” describes how to fully leverage the new advances in a traditional supply chain optimization process to include not only your internal supply chain, but the supply chains of your competitors, as well. Supply chain network design optimization tools have become well …
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At Profit Point network design analysis, answering such questions as • how many facilities a business needs, • how large they should be and where they should be located, and • how they should change over time, etc. is one of our specialties. We have performed this type of analysis for a range of companies …
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In developing a supply chain network design there are many criteria to consider – including such factors as the impact of the facility choices on • Cost of running the system, • current and future customer service, • ability to respond to changes in the market, and • risk of costly intangible events in the …
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Recently I had the opportunity to speak to an operations management class for MBA students in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. The class is intended to give the students an introduction to a variety of problems that they might encounter during their careers, and to management science techniques that might be applied to …
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In the recent weeks, I have been thinking about testing our applications, like our popular Profit Network, or Profit Vehicle Planner. When we test, we run data sets that are designed to stress the system in different ways, to ensure that all the important paths through the code are working properly. When we test, our …
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Supply Chain Survey 2013: Gaining Competitive Advantage If you’re reading our blog, you are probably someone who is deeply interested in supply chain improvement. So we’d like to invite you to participate in this brief survey. And in return, we will send you exclusive, early access to the results of the survey along with our …
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Building applications, especially custom ones, carries with it the burden of answering the question: Does this do what the customer wants? With complicated systems with many interacting features and business rules, answering this question can be daunting. In fact, evaluating the answer can be daunting too, from the perspective of the customer. Having the sales …
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