
Software That Shapes Workers’ Lives - jbegley
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-software-that-shapes-workers-lives
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rconti
Suddenly I want to take this SAP class! I imagine it's something like the
worst of Oracle Forms, but nonetheless it's really surprising and cool that
the class was one-on-one.

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momofarm
interesting, he says that software like SAP could 'predict/forecast' the
spiking demand from customer.

I wonder how this could be done. Because we know how unpredictable of these
demand are.

~~~
cosmie
That unpredictability is the reason for a demand planner. They basically act
in a similar role to a project manager, except over the demand forecast for a
product portfolio. SAP (the ERP system) snakes it's way through the entire
company, from sales to transportation to sensors directly on factory
production lines. SAP can be configured with various forecasting models that
use all that data as input, and the demand planner is a steward over both that
model and all the inputs in there. And accounts for fuzzy stuff like unusual
spikes anticipated from marketing events, or other macro level market
happenings that require manual intervention or adjustments to account for.

All of the hard stats happen within SAP, and the demand planner really just
fiddles with the knobs til the output "feels right". While there's likely a
team somewhere in the company that is responsible for the statistical models
themselves, the demand planners rarely touch them directly or even truly
understand them. They just work with whatever is configured in the system for
them, and if it doesn't feel right they might fiddle with and override the
output until they get to a forecast that makes all the stakeholders happy.

I started my career in this area. Specifically, working on a process
improvement team in a company with a top ranked global supply chain, working
on validating novel approaches towards demand and supply planning. I'm far
from an expert, but got intimately familiar with the underlying systems and
processes in this area. If there's anything in particular you'd like to know,
feel free to reach out!

~~~
Pamar
I would for sure like to learn more.

1) which gain in efficient use of resource can such a system produce? 1%?
More? Less?

2) is there a book or some article about this idea so that I can learn a bit
more and think about how to introduce this in my own business?

3) are there other products for this, apart from SAP itself?

~~~
cosmie
1) That's a complex question. The maintenance and curation of the system
itself and the data within it is a non-trivial task, which adds overhead. If
you don't right-size your process/system to your needs, and maintain it
adequately, then it very well could be a net negative on resource efficiency.
Plenty of people will blindly follow what the system recommends, even when a
basic sanity check would warn you otherwise.

On that note, different companies define resource efficiency differently. You
adjust your model according to your priorities. If you're fine with a certain
level of out of stock products or long lead times, you can bake that into your
model. With the net result (when coupled with supply planning) being that you
reduce the amount of working capital tied up in inventory, at risk of reducing
sale volume by not having stock when someone requests it. Or you can go the
other way and prioritize in-stock status, which will incorporate a buffer into
your model to account for enough variability to never be out of stock when an
order comes through. But you'll tie up massive amounts of working capital in
inventory costs to do so.

2) I don't have any off the top of my head. But some of hte terms to look at
are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning),
demand planning, just in time planning, demand forecasting

3) There are all kinds of systems for different scale businesses and different
industries. SAP is the dominant player in large scale supply chains, but there
are plenty of smaller players as well both in supply chain and other
industries. You also don't necessarily need an external product - at one point
in time, I was planning about $300MM in inventory and about $1BN in demand
using Excel. We did that manually for almost a year, replicating the entire
model and just pulling the raw data from SAP to input into the Excel model, in
order to validate a new technique in a variety of our manufacturing plants
before dropping ~$100MM+ to have SAP create a custom planning module for us
using the methodology. It was a pain to abuse Excel to the extent to use that
quantity of data (before the days of PowerQuery and being able to embed an
entire SQL database into Excel). But functionally, it worked perfectly.

My email is in my profile - feel free to reach out. I can probably give you a
bit more targeted advice if I knew more about your business itself.

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ucaetano
> Could S.C.M. software include a “workers’-rights” component—a counterpart to
> PP/DS, incorporating data on working conditions?

That exists, it is called compliance software, and usually serves as an input
(of constraints) to the SCM. It might be labor compliance (hours worked,
breaks, etc.), it might be food safety compliance (max temperature, max time
in storage, etc.), drug compliance, etc.

The article is a bit of a joke, it reads like assigning a humanities professor
to report on resource optimization techniques.

Oh, wait, that's exactly what the article is!

But well, it is the New Yorker, no reason to expect something different.

~~~
dang
Would you please review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html),
which ask you not to snark and not to post shallow dismissals here?

Your comment would be fine with just the first paragraph. Smearing the author
like that is uncivil, and dissing the publication just adds noise.

~~~
thanatropism
To be fair, it was a qualified dismissal (a proof by counter example,
essentially) followed by color (or off-color) commentary.

There's probably more polite ways of saying "this is the typical bias of non-
stem core commentators on stem core issues". But we can't all to polish our
submissions to essay or press release standards, and devaluing _negative_ off-
hand remarks will only incentivize _positive_ off-hand remarks, i.e.
sycophancy.

Take these as off-hand remarks on the concept of civil discussion. I fully
acknowledge your role and experience as the relevant qualified expert.

