After many months of angst about rapidly rising commodity prices, indications are that they are coming back down. This presents an opportunity for a data-driven business that uses advanced analytics. Though there is pain in operating a supply chain under…
With supply chain issues topping recent news, the railroad industry is under scrutiny for how well they operate their networks. As a follow-up to our previous post about railroad industry operating ratio, we here consider how analytics and machine learning…
There has never been a more challenging time for the trucking industry. From driver retention and recruiting, to safety, maintenance, and fuel savings, leading companies are now beginning to use a data analytics approach to improve their operations and financial…
Alison Crawford, Senior Manager, Industry and Solutions Marketing at Kinaxis and Jenny Reese, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing at Kinaxis sat down with Rob Stevens to discuss how Covid-19 has impacted supply chains and suggestions to make any supply chain disruption…
Rob Stevens with First Analytics will be speaking at the upcoming Foresight Practitioner Conference November 13th at 9:30 AM in Chapel Hill, NC. This conference will primarily focus on Artificial Intelligence and what this means for forecasting and planning. Rob…
Back in 2016, Tom Davenport wrote a book, “Only Human’s Need Apply." This book was focused on the notion that companies should embrace smart technologies and ensure they are well positioned to have work augmented by them, and not automated…
We are excited to present some work we have been doing with the Kellogg Company to bring machine learning into the demand planning process. If you can make your way to SAS Analytics Experience in San Diego September 17-19th, we'd…
The sharing of techniques and methodologies across industries can produce advances in successful applications, not only for the practice of analytics as a whole, but for individual firms. Practitioners in the areas of marketing and supply chain analytics, for example,…
Companies use forecasting methods to plan for future demand using time series data. Often, these time series can be represented in a hierarchy. For example, products can be broken down to different levels of sales data. Figure 1 shows an…
The hot field of analytics is rife with hype and its associated buzzwords, such as “big data” and “data science.” Some have pointed out that, while the world fixates on big data, there are opportunities to be had with the small data…