Thomas Willemain

Co-founder at Smart Software, Inc., Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tom is co-founder of Smart Software, Inc. of Belmont, MA and Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Federal Aviation Administration and as Expert Statistical Consultant at the National Security Agency. He holds the BSE degree (summa cum laude) from Princeton and the Ph.D. degree from MIT.

Executive

Track: Supply Chain Analytics

Dominating the Inventory Battlefield: Fighting Randomness With Randomness

Inventory management is a constant war against randomness in demand and supply. This is true whether the inventory owner is a manufacturer, distributor, or MRO organization. This presentation shows how next-generation analytics provide the tools to dominate this battlefield, including (1) regime change filtering to maintain data relevance against sudden shifts in the operating environment, (2) bootstrapping methods to generate large numbers of realistic demand and lead time scenarios to fuel models, (3) discrete event simulations to process the input scenarios and expose the links between management actions and key performance indicators, (4) stochastic optimization based on simulation experiments to tune each item for best results. Without the analytics, inventory owners have two choices: sticking with rigid operating policies usually based on invalid rules of thumb and probably well beyond their sell-by dates, or resorting to guesswork that may not help and does not scale.