Daniel Stanton

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been around in some form since the 1950s, it was the first public release of ChatGPT and OpenAI’s foundational large language models (LLMs) like GPT 3.5 that made generative AI (GenAI) applications available to people who aren’t data scientists and computer geniuses.OpenAI’s models and models from companies such as Google, Facebook, Anthropic, and others ignited the world’s demand for increasingly sophisticated GenAI models and tools, and the market was quick to deliver.

These days, it’s hard to find a supply chain process that isn’t tied to a piece of software. You can’t place an order, make a phone call, or move a box without logging a transaction in one or more systems. But processes don’t become automated instantly; they need to evolve.An approach that tracks the evolution of a process or the software that supports that process is the capability maturity model (CMM).

Supply chain careers and job titles can be confusing, because supply chain management is a relatively new field. (The term supply chain has been around only since the 1980s.) Many supply chain jobs are evolving so quickly that the government agencies that track employment data have a hard time keeping up. Staying up to date with new job titles is a little bit easier for companies because they can change job titles fairly easily, without a lot of red tape.

The process of making anything starts when you decide what to make, how much to make, and when to make it. In a manufacturing company, this process is (conveniently) called production planning and scheduling. Service companies often make life more complicated by finding creative names for this process, but most of them sound a lot like “service planning and scheduling.

Three words — correlation, causation, and interpolation — are key to almost everything that happens in supply chain analytics. If you understand what they mean and how to use them, the rest of analytics is a breeze.Correlation and causation are closely related. Correlation means that two variables are connected in some way.

In virtually every supply chain, gaps exist between when something is made and when a customer is ready to buy or receive it. Those gaps mean that products end up sitting around. The problem is that someone owns those products and has money tied up in them. In addition, someone needs to keep track of where those products are and protect them from damage (and perhaps even theft).