All good things must come to an end It has been a pleasure sharing my thoughts and perspectives with you all. This website helped me express my thoughts and perspectives during a crucial phase of my career and hence will be a cherished memory for me forever. However, it is time to move on. Starting Monday, Apr 19th, this Blogsite will cease to exist. But the journey continues ! I have learnt and shared a lot-now is the time to put that to use and continue learning doing so. “…..But I have promises to keep,    And miles to go before I sleep “ ——Robert Frost Adios ..read more

This weekend was not great for me. The sudden drop in temperature gave me cold that started getting bad by Friday evening and was worse by Satuday. I still started working on my Deep Reinforcement learning lessons (because all I had was the weekend to work on it), hardly got anything while going through the lessons and videos, still ended up attempting graded questions, and got most of them wrong. Nothing seemed to be going my way. So I needed to relax. One thing that I love doing that helps me relax, along with two other hobbies (gardening and drawing), is assembling electronics projects usin ..read more

It is around midnight so I will try to keep it as short as possible. I have been asking my wife to introduce me to MATLAB programming for months now. She finally started doing that this weekend. Why am I so interested in learning MATLAB ? Afterall, it is not one of the “desired” programming languages these days. Long before there was Python or R or even the words “Data Science”, MATLAB was used by academia, defense and public sector to develop algorithms that we are now able to develop using open source tools like Python and R. Most engineering students in my generation had at least one course ..read more

Jeff Bezos in 2017 quoted: “Innovation is not disruptive, consumer adoption is “. What does this mean ? This means that the customer/end user does not give a sh**t about how weirdly insane or complex your product is. All they care about is whether it will solve their problem or not. What lies in the backend is not their problem. The reason they want to buy your solution is to simplify something at their end. If simplicity is so important for the end consumer, why businesses do not value it ? A. Simplicity needs to be in the intuition, not necessarily in the product Ya…I know the title above d ..read more

“The Power is not in the weapon but in the person who wields the weapon” Bhagvad Gita A. Where does the power lie in the world of Analytics and Planning solutions ? Not in technology anymore Have you noticed that Tech consulting companies like Accenture and Deloitte have practices focussed on certain third part Supply Chain solutions ? These practices help their clients leverage those solution in their business operations. Often, these providers (Accentures and Deloittes of the world) make much much more helping clients leverage that solution optimally, than the solution provider itself make ..read more

Why I did not write much about Pandemic and its impact on Supply Chains I can write a response to the question above in many sentences but the short answer to start with is – I hate “Flavor of the month” topics. Ever since pandemic severely disrupted our lives and our Supply Chains, we have milked the sh*t out of it in terms of thought leadership. I can list 100+ articles that cover the same “vaccine Supply Chain” theory, each one written after the previous one. There was no value add in writing the 5th one, let alone the 100th one. Yet, they were written. Why ? Because the most current flavor ..read more

Note: As a standard practice, I will include a plagiarism detection link in all the articles on my blog site. You can use the online tool below to evaluate any article published on the web for plagiarized content. All you have to do is to paste the url of the article there and it will go through every sentence in the article and flag any plagiarism. I believe as a follower of “writer’s integrity” I should include this tool in all my articles: https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ ———————————————————————————————————– Revisiting the Classic In the March 1997 issue of HBR, Dr. Marshall Fi ..read more

Aiming for the “Bird’s eye” From the ancient Indian text of “Mahabharata” : A Guru is teaching a group of young princes the age old skill of archery. He puts a dummy bird on a tree at a distance from where the kids are standing (with their bows and arrows) and asks them to take their turn trying to shoot the bird. The rule was that the arrow should strike the eye of the bird When each of them gets into the position to shoot the arrow at the bird, the guru asks them a question- “What do you see son ?” Replies come in different flavors. Some say they see a cluster of trees and the bird on one of ..read more

I said so ! More than two years ago, I wrote a Sci-Fi short story on this very blog site. The link to that article is below. While the entire scenario that plays out in that story has not happened yet, since I set the story in year 2029 and I am still confident that the capabilities and tools mentioned in my story will be in place around 2030, a key aspects of my story was: ” There was now one specific area where the demand peaked. Companies now needed to train their new workforce-The Digital Workforce. This was about “Reskilling”. Resources like Alice-who were not true advanced analytics prof ..read more

After deciding to go back into a full time role after my sabbatical, I started a new and exciting role this week. Considering that my focus now will be to nurture and grow the practice areas I will be responsible for in my role, I will visit this blog once only on weekends. Which means, going forward, I will publish only one article on this Blog, evey weekend. The topics will be more strategic in nature. It has been an absolute pleaure sharing my insights with you. While I decided to close my other channels to focus on my role, I will put one musing here every weekend because many of you have ..read more