R in Supply Chain: Intro to Supply Chain Design & Forecasting Demand with R

R in Supply Chain Meetup
Presentations by Ralph Asher & Laura Rose

Two talks!
Intro to Supply Chain Design - Ralph Asher
Forecasting Demand with R - Laura Rose

Are you a data scientist or data analyst working in supply chain management? Are you interested in joining a group of fellow practitioners and taking a leadership role in developing and promoting open source solutions in your field? Join us!

At this meetup, we will also propose the formation of a community working group focused on developing and popularizing open source solutions for data scientists and analysts working in supply chain management. We'd love to start by creating a home – initially a website – which hosts resources for supply chain data scientists. More to come.

Intro to Supply Chain Design

Abstract:
COVID-19 has moved supply chain management from the back office to front-page news. And along with it, the discipline of supply chain design – the strategic evaluation of deciding where to locate manufacturing sites, warehouses, and other supply chain facilities – has gone from a little-known niche to a C-suite priority.

In this talk, I will introduce the field of supply chain design to the R community. Drawing upon my decade of experience in supply chain design and R, I will give a short example of how to design a warehouse network to support future customer need. This example will be drawn directly from my experience in the corporate world and my consulting business.

Speaker Bio:
Ralph Asher is the founder of Data Driven Supply Chain LLC, a Minnesota-based consulting firm that uses data science and AI to evaluate, design, and optimize supply chains. (www.datadrivensupplychain.com) Prior to founding Data Driven Supply Chain, Ralph worked as an Operations Research Scientist in corporate supply chain functions for 8 years at Target, designing e-commerce supply chain networks, and at General Mills, designing warehousing networks. Ralph has used R for supply chain analytics for a decade and can be reached at ralph@datadrivensupplychain.com or via LinkedIn.

Forecasting Demand with R

Abstract:
Over the course of about a year, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals’ Specialty Generics division replaced an expensive SaaS (Software as a Service) with an R script and alternate forecasting process. Using an RStudio Enterprise solution, they have found a more flexible and cost-effective way to forecast demand and analyze data with R. This discussion will detail the process of replacing a SaaS with R, as well as challenges and next steps in the project.

Speaker Bio:
Laura Darby Rose is Manager of Demand at Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, where she is responsible for statistical forecasting, forecast visualization, and forecast accuracy measurement for the Specialty Generics division. She has a M.A. in Economics from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and enjoys using R and SQL for time-series analysis, creating Shiny apps, and data wrangling/cleaning.