All Things Inventory

The Lever of Riches

  

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One of the delightful books I read some years ago is Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches (Technological Creativity and Economic Progress). A recent book by Brian Arthur -- billed as "the most important book on technology and the economy since Schumpeter" -- is an original (and extremely lucid) analysis of how we as a society have evolved from stone tools to  iPads. I am very pleased that Brian will be the keynote speaker at our annual Forum this year in Chicago (September 21).

This is SmartOps' seventh Forum, and the third one in Chicago. In 2005, when we first did the event in Chicago, the keynote speaker was Steve Levitt (before he was this famous and unaffordable) and he gave an engaging and funny talk on topics from his book Freakonomics. True to his self, and consistent with the attitide of being a tenured professor (at University of Chicago), he not only ignored my suggestions to skip potentially 'offensive' topics, but actually opened with them! Last year, again in Chicago, we had Geoff Colvin, the author of The Upside of the Downturn, as the keynote speaker and it was a wonderful talk. I expect that Brian's talk this year will bring refreshing clarity at a time of great uncertainty and confusion as to what actually drives the world economy. (FYI: Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, is a big fan of Brian and has applied Brian's ideas at Google.)

Of course, like at our previous Forums, there will be speakers who will present how thay have benefited from the new science and technology of enterprise inventory optimization, and how they are generating predictable margins and delivering stable and consistent service levels  in their supply chains even in a time of unusual uncertainty and volatility. This year Dupont and Danfoss will be highlighted, and I expect thay will be received as well as last year's presentations (from Celestica and Wyeth/Pfizer). There will also be an opportunity to test drive our technology through our educational sessions. As always, we will discuss new innovations and modules with the customers in our SmartOps User Group (SUG) sessions.

This year's Forum is co-sponsored by SAP and Accenture. SmartOps is a solution extension of SAP; Accenture and SmartOps have a strategic partnership to help clients in P-SIOP, Profitable Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning, which combines the twin benefits of enterprise inventory optimization and service level optimization to dramatically enhance the traditional S&OP process.

For book lovers, let me also suggest (Pulitzer prize winner) Thomas McGraw's Prophet of Innovation (Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction) and Timothy Ferris' The Science of Liberty (Democracy, Reason and The Laws of Nature).