Kinaxis’s Andrew Bell on why supply chains need to reverse decades of optimization – and become more complex on purpose
Over the years, I have noticed that there’s a nasty inverse relationship that accompanies the use of computers to build elegant models of the world, whether in finance or any other field.
Let’s call it Thomas’s law.
Effectively, the more we simplify models to enable faster decisions, the more we load risk onto the assumptions necessary to enable that simplification — and the more catastrophic the results when the world insists on its right to reassert reality.
More simply:
The more of reality a model ignores, the larger the blast radius when reality insists.
Which is why my recent conversation with Andrew Bell, Chief Product Officer at Kinaxis, felt familiar — even though I’ve never been a supply-chain manager.
Because supply-chain professionals also build models — and over decades they have used them with extraordinary success to drive simplification and efficiency into supply networks, based on seemingly stable assumptions about...
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