Ralph Asher @ Data Driven Supply Chain | Data Science Hangout
In this Hangout, Ralph talks about his experiences in the supply chain industry - a hidden gem of a data job field - and his educational background in Operations Research. He talks about the types of problems supply chain analysts work to solve, how 2020 reshaped the landscape of supply chain, and how he decided to start his own business. He also gives some great advice about marketing yourself, whether you’re starting your own consulting company or looking for a new role: be specific about what you want and the problems you solve. If you’ve been curious about supply chain jobs, you’ll want to hear Ralph’s perspective! Speaker bio: Ralph Asher is the founder of Data Driven Supply Chain LLC, a Minneapolis-based consultancy working at the intersection of supply chain and decision science. Since 2021, Ralph and his team have used decision science and data science to build advanced supply chain models, helping clients make tough supply chain decisions around network design, inventory optimization, and more. Timestamps: 03:00 About Ralph Asher 05:35 What type of problems do supply chain analysts work on? 07:55 What type of data jobs are there in the Supply Chain Industry? 10:15 How did COVID-19 impact supply chain jobs? 13:10 How do you know you’re ready to start a consulting business? 15:25 With so much data, how do you make sure insights are actionable and not irrelevant? 17:30 What are some examples of data management or governance challenges in supply chain? 18:15 What career advice would you give new grads or people looking to switch careers? 21:10 Why being specific about what you want to do gets you job opportunities 23:55 Book recommendation: The Black Swan and preserving optionality, keeping doors open 25:20 Is a supply chain consultant more valuable and effective than a supply chain department? 26:50 How do you learn all the parts of running a business by yourself? The E-Myth Revisited book 29:20 Do you ever have to convince people to move past Excel? Supply chain runs on Excel. 31:05 Career advice - lean into something you’re good at. The Algebra of Wealth book 33:30 How do you manage data and metadata? How do you manage knowledge for your business? 36:25 How do you determine which clients to accept and which to turn away as a consultant? 37:45 How do you do discovery work with a consulting client to make sure they’re a fit? 39:10 Saying no to the wrong jobs so that you can say yes to the right jobs 40:00 Can client discovery be done as a paid project? Could it be its own product? 44:00 As a consultant, how do you make the unseen hours of labor visible? 46:10 What is a good entry point for a company that doesn’t have a dedicated supply chain team? 47:35 Should you go back to school for another degree to get a job that feels out of reach? 49:10 How does your career growth change between IC and management? 50:55 What are some supply chain communities to join? 52:10 Do supply chain teams work within data teams or separately? 55:50 As a consultant on your own, how do you keep your skills sharp and up to date? 57:20 How do you use Shiny in your supply chain consulting jobs? Resources mentioned in the episode: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb: https://www.randomhousebooks.com/books/176226/ The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber: https://www.michaelegerbercompanies.com/product/the-e-myth-revisited/ The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients by David Fields: https://www.davidafields.com/books/#section-1 The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730881/the-algebra-of-wealth-by-scott-galloway/ Notion: https://www.notion.so/ HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm CSCMP, Council for Supply Chain Management Professionals: https://cscmp.org/ ASCM, the Association for Supply Chain Management: https://www.ascm.org/ ISM, Institute for Supply Management: https://www.ismworld.org/ INFORMS, Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences: https://www.informs.org/ ________________________ ► Subscribe to Our Channel Here: https://bit.ly/2TzgcOu Follow Us Here: Website: https://www.posit.co LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posit-software The Hangout is a gathering place for the whole data science community to chat about data science leadership and questions you're all facing that happens every Thursday at 12 ET. To join future data science hangouts, add to your calendar here: https://pos.it/dsh We'd love to have you join us in the conversation live! Thanks for hanging out with us!
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Welcome back, everybody, to the Data Science Hangout. I'm Rachel. If we haven't met before, I lead customer marketing at Posit. I've learned from a friend at the Hangout that it might be helpful for me to let people know that Posit is actually the company formerly called RStudio. I had assumed that mistakenly, that everybody knew that. So I just want to make sure that I add that in the beginning as well. So at Posit, we build enterprise solutions and open source tools for people who do data science with both R and Python. And so I'm joined by my lovely co-host here as well, Libby, if you want to introduce yourself.
Hi, I'm Libby. I work with Posit to do community management for the Data Science Hangout, and I'm also a data science mentor at the Posit Academy, where I help people learn R and Python to do their jobs better. So happy to have you all joining us here today. If this is your first Data Science Hangout, this is our open space to hear what's going on in the world of data across all different industries, chat about data science leadership, and connect with others who are facing similar things as you. And we get together here every Thursday at the same time, same place. So if you are watching us as a recording on YouTube and want to join us live in the future, there'll be details to add it to your own calendar below. At the Hangout, we're all dedicated to keeping this a friendly and welcoming space for everyone, and love hearing from you no matter your years of experience, titles, industry, or languages that you work in. And I know people really enjoy connecting with other attendees here in the chat, so I'll encourage you if you want to right now to briefly introduce yourself and say hi, maybe share your LinkedIn or include your role, something you do for fun. That chat is yours to use during the Hangout to connect with other people.
Feel free to also share any open roles that your team may be hiring for too.
There are three ways that you can jump in and ask questions today, or just share your own experience or point of view. You can raise your hand on Zoom and we will call on you to jump in. You can put a question in the Zoom chat. Feel free to put an asterisk next to it, after it, before it. If you are someplace noisy or your mic doesn't work, you're not able to read it yourself, we'll read it for you. And then we also have a Slido link where you can ask questions anonymously, and that will be in the chat. I think Isabella has already posted it in the chat. Yeah, there we go. Awesome.
Well, I'm so excited to be joined today by our co-host Ralph Asher, who is the founder of Data Driven Supply Chain LLC. Hey, Ralph, I would love to get started with you just telling us a little bit about yourself, how you maybe got into data and supply chain. And I would also love to hear a little bit about what you do outside of work.
Ralph's background
Great. Well, thank you, first off, Libby and Rachel, for inviting me. This is a great opportunity to connect with the data community and just talk a little bit about the supply chain design and the associated disciplines. So, background, grew up in Indiana, in small town Indiana, went to hometown U, as I call it, studied physics, and about halfway through, I realized I wasn't that great at physics, so I joined the Marines after graduation. That's half a joke, but I love the ability to understand how real life is connected to math, and so studied physics and wanted to serve my country. For six years after college, I was on active duty in the Marine Corps as a communications officer where I led teams of technical Marines who were doing things like setting up radio networks and computer networks and things like that. Towards the end of that time, went back to school for operations research, which for those who might be an unfamiliar term, operations research is the discipline of essentially problem solving using math with different disciplines of mathematics, optimization, statistics, and engineering, all mixed together towards solving problems.
So, went back to school, got my master's in that, moved to Minnesota and started working at General Mills, the food company, which is here, doing supply chain design. And what supply chain design is, is basically using those operations research techniques to inform where a company or an organization should have their manufacturing plants, where they should have their distribution centers, their warehouses, how products should ultimately flow to their customers. So, worked there for a couple years, then was hired to work at Target, which is located here also in Minnesota, and worked there for several years before starting my company doing consulting on supply chain design and inventory optimization and some related things. Outside of work, I like to run, I like to be active. Minnesota is great for that. I also have two small children and a minivan and a dog and a house, so kind of got all my hands full as far as that goes.
Supply chain as a data field
I would love to hear a little bit about, for anybody who isn't aware of the type of problems that are solved in supply chain, would you mind giving us a little rundown or some background on the types of problems that you solve, maybe for a place like Target, and what type of data you use to solve your problems?
Sure. So, types of problems, one is what I alluded to earlier, so facility location. Where should my distribution centers be? Where should my plants be? How big should they be? How much capacity, meaning how much storage and how much throughput, how fast can they get product out the door? How much should that do? If you're talking about a manufacturer or even with a distribution center, what types of products should be put in those facilities? So, for example, if you go into a Target, you can see that there's things like clothing and electronics that can go through just a standard ambient temperature warehouse that doesn't really have temperature control, but you also have things like milk and eggs and cheese, and that has to go through a refrigerated warehouse, and then you have things like frozen pizza, frozen vegetables, that has to go through a frozen warehouse. And so, those are actually separate supply chains, and you need to design your network in accordance with the demands for those temperature channels and where your demand is geographically.
Some other questions are around inventory. So, for example, how much of a product should I stock in my store or in my warehouse to both satisfy my customer demand but not also hold too much inventory? Because inventory ultimately is money tied up in physical form, and so you want to have a trade-off between having enough to satisfy your customer's demands but not having too much where you're unnecessarily tying up money in that sense. For the last several years I worked at Target, I was working on what's called last-mile network design. So, inside the e-commerce realm, how do we design e-commerce networks to ensure fast delivery to the customers, calls, and guests of their e-commerce packages in a way that is both highly convenient to that customer but also cost-effective and makes sense from the business side of it? So, those are some of the big things in supply chain design and supply chain optimization, but it goes way past that one.
I wanted you to talk a little bit about it because I think that supply chain is a super data-driven field that kind of gets ignored by people when they're looking to move into data. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the sort of market or maybe advice that you've seen for people who are shifting into data and what they might be able to do because there's a lot of data jobs that we see that are like, we think of prediction only, or we think of inferential statistics only. And supply chain is a little bit different in that it's optimization, right?
Yeah. Well, the nice thing about supply chain, and this will touch a little bit on your data question, is that depending upon what you're interested in, both from an analytical perspective and from just a career trajectory perspective, supply chain offers a lot of opportunities. So, if you are in the data visualization space, there's a great market for people who want to focus on BI diagnostic analytics within supply chain. If you're more in the forecasting and the predictive space, that's a huge market, right? Because we need to predict how much demand the product is going to be. We need to predict how much activity we're going to have in our warehouses or our plants so we know how to staff appropriately. Now, if you go into more of the prescriptive things, like operations research and optimization, there's plenty of work there and some of the things I spoke to before. So, one of the awesome things about supply chain as a data field is that there's something for everybody. And if you're more on the data engineering side too, supply chains run on data. Supply chains generate data left, right, and center. Whether or not the organizations are aware of that or using it, it's there. And so, there's opportunity there, and it's an awesome field if you are somebody that is both interested in the analytical technical side but also interested in solving real-world problems that actually matter to people. And that's something that was a real draw to me initially and continues to be a draw for me.
COVID-19 and supply chain disruption
Yeah, I was curious about how COVID-19 may have impacted what you do, especially because, and I think a lot of fields are going through this, where all of our kind of OHUM stats, you know, like our dashboards and everything, which had variation in it, just kind of went really crazy. I'm in HR, and we had just crazy, like, turnover. And so, I'm just kind of wondering, did you anticipate any of that? And how did you adjust to the changes that we saw with COVID-19?
That's a great question. I think that I'll answer the second part first. I think that, of course, COVID-19, and not so much the disease itself and the epidemic itself, but rather the actions associated with preventing it. So, things like, you know, social distancing, that means that if you're working in a manufacturing plant, you're usually working pretty close to each other. Right now, you can't, which means you're working more slowly. Or things like we saw with the port backups, because of a whole lot more ships coming from East Asia into the Southern California ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. So, a lot of these things we saw during COVID-19, I think, are somewhat unique in the sense that we had a intersection point of multiple major disruptions to global supply chains from both a supply side and a demand side. And that is probably not going to happen to that level of magnitude in my lifetime again. At least I hope not.
And so, the question then is, you know, what are the lessons we should learn from it going forward? I think there's a lot of discussions, and I've been in them, around when we look at, say, 2020 through 2022 from a demand perspective, do you just take the actuals, or do you smooth that out and do some sort of interpolation? Because you don't want to necessarily just use the history as a prediction of what's going forward. More broadly, there's a lot of discussions around supply chain leaders around, you know, what do we do with our supply chains going forward? I don't think anybody has the right answer. And frankly, the right answer for you and your company is going to be different than even another company in your same industry, much less a different industry.
Starting a consulting business
Ralph, I have a question about your decision to strike out on your own, because I feel like there are a lot of people right now, including me in the past couple of years, who have thought maybe I could freelance, maybe I could do consulting. So, I'm wondering what your decision process was like? How did you know it was time to go out on your own?
Yeah, great. So, I really enjoy the problem-solving component of this type of work, and that was what I really liked about my corporate job. And I was talking with a friend of mine. I said, hey, I really enjoy this, but I'm kind of doing less of it as time goes on. He said, well, have you thought about consulting? This was pre-COVID. And at that point, most consulting firms were traveling, you know, four days a week and young family not really interested in that. Then when COVID struck, you know, everybody's working from home for the most part. I thought, you know, this seems like a real great time to kind of strike out and start my own company. And, you know, if things don't work out, I can go back to work at a quote-unquote real job eventually.
So, in terms of what I did and what I would give as advice, don't do it on a lark. Don't just wake up and say, man, I don't like my job. I'm done with this. And go from there. You need to do a lot of preparation. So, one of the things that people tend to not necessarily realize when they're working in a real job is like how much of a support structure is associated with that job you have. So, they're paying your half of your taxes. Like they are, at least on the Medicare and the Social Security side, they're providing your health insurance maybe in your retirement plan. If you're on your own, like you're on your own. That's all yours. And so, you got to think about how are you going to have a business entity? Are you going to find clients? What kind of work are you going to do? And then how are you going to address things like, you know, health insurance and all those other things that, for the most part, are just kind of given to you when you start a job.
Making insights actionable
With the increasing amount of data available, how do you make sure that insights derived are actionable and are not overwhelmed by noise or irrelevant information?
Oh, that is a great one. I think that, yeah, as data becomes more and more available, it does give us the temptation to think that I can just get a little bit more detail, or I just need a little bit more and I can make a little bit better decision. I think something that is a characteristic that was imbued to me in the military and then really kind of crystallized by my teaching operations research is to understand what are the prime movers? Like, what are the biggest things that matter the most? And what are the things that, if they are different, would change your decision? And if they aren't different, would change your decision? And so it's helpful to just say, if this thing we're tracking, if it was higher or lower, would we make a different decision? And if so, how big of a magnitude would that decision be differently? Because if it's not going to be that big of a difference, then it's not going to change what you would be doing. And if it's not going to change what you'd be doing, you don't need to pay that close of attention to it. I think that's the biggest thing. And that's going to be, of course, context dependent.
Marketing yourself
Yeah, that's great. So if you're looking to switch industry, new grad, I would say the biggest thing is find a tagline and lean into it. So what do I mean by a tagline? I'm going to say something completely unrelated to supply chain. Say, hi, my name is John Smith, and I'm looking for a position in marketing analytics in the greater Denver area. Okay, that's a tagline. What does that do? That now gives somebody three things, three hooks that they can get in, that they can help you. Now, maybe, or either help you or refer to others. So somebody says, hey, I'm looking for marketing analytics positions in Denver. Well, I know somebody in marketing. Most people know somebody in marketing. I'm going to introduce you to that person in marketing. Or, oh, Denver, my cousin lives there. Maybe he knows somebody that's in the more marketing space locally. It gives you something that allows you, maybe not that first person that you talk to is probably not going to be the one saying, wow, I have been looking for you my whole life. Here's a job. What they're going to do is they're going to give you those second, third, fourth connections. And you need to give those people something to help you with. What doesn't help is saying, hi, I'm willing to do any job. Like, I don't know how to help you.
And so find that tagline, lean into it. And then something that I read early on in my career, and I think this is very helpful, is to say that if you want to have an extraordinary career, there's two ways to do it. One is to be the absolute best in the world at something, which vast majority of us are not going to be. It doesn't matter how much you like singing or playing basketball. You're probably not going to be LeBron James or Taylor Swift. There's not that many people at the tippy-tippy top of any field. But pick two or three things that are independently valuable. Aim to be in the top quartile of each of those. And now suddenly you have that unique skill set. So I mean, it's honestly not that hard to be in the top 25% of anything. I would guess that by being on this call, everybody here is in the top 25% of data analytics across the entire population, probably significantly higher for most of you. So now commit yourself to learning supply chain or marketing or finance or whatever it is and get better at that. So now you have that intersection point. That's something that I would highly recommend.
And so find that tagline, lean into it. But pick two or three things that are independently valuable. Aim to be in the top quartile of each of those. And now suddenly you have that unique skill set.
I so totally agree with this. I just want to like add my agreement to it because when I first started freelancing, I either didn't get work or didn't get the right work for a long time. And I was telling people I can do anything in XYZ. And until I started telling people here is exactly what I do and what I want to do, I just wasn't getting any traction. But once I started putting that out there, everybody that I talked to, I said, hey, this exactly is what I want to do. The opportunities started popping up way, way, way more.
Yeah, that was when, so I used to work as a mechanical engineer back in the day. And I worked in Houston. And in 2020, when the world shut down Houston, lots of people were job seeking because Houston runs on energy. And so I was trying to make a change. And me and my one of my friends at the gym were like just chit-chatting about like what we were looking to do next. And my friend's wife happened to overhear that. And she said, oh, like you're like a nerd who likes doing numbers stuff. We're hiring. And I said out loud to her, like, I don't I don't think I'd be a good fit, but it's worth giving a shot. And it turned out it was a really good fit. But yeah, it just I guess like to your point, Libby, it's we were like chit-chatting about like, I don't know, the very niche areas where we wanted to do our career pivots. And just someone happened to overhear that and say like, hey, I've got an opening that like fits that specific thing you're looking for.
Yeah, it may be kind of old school, something I would actually if you're looking here in the job seeking, make business cards for yourself that are independent of your company. And they're cheap. You can get 250 business cards for less than 30 bucks. I just did that off Steepo and be like, you know, here's my name. Here's the thing I'm looking for. And now when you meet this person, it's not like, oh, I met that guy at the gym. Nothing. Like what was their name? Well, I got their card. Hopefully.
Yeah, I haven't seen a business card in a while. But I guess the point is talk to people about what you want. Tell them what you want because they won't know unless you tell them.
Preserving optionality and career advice
Oh, okay. Yeah, I actually made a list of book recommendations. So I'm glad you narrowed it down a little bit with the preserving optionality. Yeah. So if anybody here is a fan of Nassim Taleb, he wrote The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. He wrote a couple other books. And one of his principles is what's called preserving optionality, which is essentially to say, you can make decisions and you should, but keep other doors open, keep the options open. So, you know, if you take a kind of a hybrid approach to your career, if you're pursuing supply chain analytics, well, you could, if you don't like that niche, you could probably make an option of going into another component of analytics or more of a business side job of supply chain. You know, it's always about try to focus your career into something that is valuable and where you will be very valuable, but give yourself outs if you need to make a move, you know, for whatever reason.
I mean, the biggest thing is just try to lean into something that you are very good at. I don't know if anybody here has heard of Scott Galloway. He's kind of a public intellectual, but he just wrote this book called The Algebra of Wealth. And one of his taglines is, don't pursue your passion, pursue your strengths, and the passion will come. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom to that. I think that when you take an honest self-assessment of what your, what nascent talent you have, and how you can nurture that to make yourself commercially valuable in the marketplace, you'll start to like your job more. We can all think of things, whether work-wise or otherwise, where we just didn't have any talent for it, and you didn't enjoy it. But you think of things that you had some talent for, and you got better, and you're like, oh, I like seeing the self-development. I like how other people interact with me positively because they see good work in me. And then you start getting passionate for things because you're good at it, not the other way around, necessarily. So that's a piece of advice that I think is underappreciated, but has definitely worked for me.
Don't pursue your passion, pursue your strengths, and the passion will come.
Running a consulting business
Well, I thought about it a long time and did a lot of research before I resigned from Target to start my company. There's a lot of great resources out there if you're starting a company of any kind, whether it be consulting or if you're running a restaurant or whatever. And so, there's a lot of really great business books out there. And so, if you are wanting to start your own company, there's two books I'd recommend. One is called The E-Myth Revisited. It's basically saying when you own your own business, you have three separate personas that you need to inhabit. One is the visionary of where you want to be. One is the manager of making sure day-to-day things are happening. And the one is the worker who's actually doing the things. And so, you need to have all three together. And that was a shift for me. It took me a while to realize I need to have mentally these three gears in me every single day. And another great book, at least for consultants, by a guy named David Fields. And it's called The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Getting Clients, I believe is the title. It's kind of self-explanatory what the title is about, but it talks a lot about independent consulting and the things of it.
And in terms of just the nuts and bolts of it, a lot of great resources online. And there's all sorts of things you need to do, like set up an LLC, get separate bank accounts, get a website, get your own work email, things like that. But thankfully, once you do a lot of it, one time it doesn't have a, there's not a ton of maintenance after that.
Moving past Excel in supply chain
Did you have to convince your previous teams or your current clients to move past Excel? Our supply chain work is still heavily dependent on using Excel, but we're trying to move to more advanced analytics like Shiny apps, simulations, optimization, et cetera. Would love some advice on how you up-skilled yourself and your teams out of Excel, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, every supply chain and every company runs on Excel to a very, very large degree. And I would say, push where you can, but ultimately your goal should be just to add value to the company with whatever analytical approach you're doing. Now, I think that there's absolutely ways in which you can include some of those more advanced technologies and advanced methodologies that are complementary to how people are already working. Like, there's nothing to say that you can't make this really nice Shiny dashboard that has these automated visuals and it's connected to the data stack so that it refreshes it every morning for people when they start working and have it where people can take the data and do additional work in Excel. Those things aren't necessarily in conflict. Now, sometimes people try to take Excel too far and do things that it was not designed to do, for sure. But I don't think that it's necessarily that you need to feel like you're in opposition against how other people are working.
Finding and vetting consulting clients
This is kind of back on the topic of consulting and finding your own clients, but how do you determine which... It's a good problem to have, but how do you determine which clients to accept and which to turn away? What does that process look like for intake?
That's a great question. Oftentimes, it comes down to what are their objectives, what are their goals? Sometimes, individuals will come to me with what I would consider to be more traditional supply chain consulting, in which case, I am definitely not the best people to do it, but I know great people that I can refer them to and get them towards those individuals. One of the principles that I go by is that I want anybody that I talk to that is interested in services, I want to make sure that they get to somebody who will help them and help them in a way that they need. That might be me. It might not be me. To the level that I feel like I can comfortably give them what they should be looking for and what they're asking about, we'll take that in and scope them there. Sometimes, they need something that is outside of my core offerings, and I'm going to give that referral to somebody who I know will help take care of them.
That's a great question. Sometimes, yes, people, what they're seeking might be here, but what their core problem is might be here. In sales training, you're taught to seek for the need behind the need. For example, if I say, I need to go to McDonald's right now, is the need that I need McDonald's, or is the need that I'm hungry, or is the need that I'm anxious and I really like ice cream? There's a couple of different levels behind what somebody says they might be wanting right now and what actually will satisfy the core problem. Part of discovery process is sometimes individuals like, oh, we're really looking to do this type of project. It's very direct. Sometimes it's a little bit more just unknown at the beginning and we got to talk through and get down to the point where maybe I'm good for that and my team is good for that. Maybe somebody else is.
I accepted work that maybe wasn't the right fit for me out of anxiety, like a sense of scarcity. Oh, this project has come along. I better say yes to it because if I say no to it, what's going to happen? I think getting over that and trusting that the right stuff is coming. If I say no to the wrong stuff, it opens up space for the right stuff was really, really helpful. It's scary, but it's doable.
Opportunity costs are real and you don't necessarily know it until you spend your time on something you shouldn't be and then you realize you can't on the times on something you should be spending your time.
Ralph, are there ever projects where you feel like the discovery or there's so much ambiguity with the project or the data or what the client really needs that maybe you consider something like a pre-project where a client might pay you to do a more robust discovery or data due diligence type of process? Is that something that you see in the independent consulting space or not really?
Yes. There's definitely cases where, particularly if it's a brand new client, they may not have an idea of what their data circumstances are. I might propose saying, well, we could do this very, very large thing. Make sure I've got both my hands in the camera. Do a very, very large thing here, but let's do something staged and I'll say, let's propose doing this. It's going to be shorter. It's going to be of a lower cost. And then if you are satisfied with those answers, great. Otherwise, if you want to expand on it, then we can kind of roll that into a larger project. And that gives the time to understand more of the data layout and some of the complexities of what they may be facing.
And when supply chains, sometimes the small jobs are the most effective just to kind of give people direction. Maybe the question might be, somebody might call and say, Ralph, I'm looking at where our distribution centers are and I really think we need one in the southeast. We don't have one in the southeast. Can you help me give some directions on what we should be doing that? And you can do that kind of work relatively quickly without necessarily too much data, without necessarily too much time or sophistication. And the answer might be, yes, you really should be looking in these two or three states. Or it should be, no, no, you don't. And if the answer is, okay, well, can we go a little bit more detailed so I'll know what metro area to look at? Then that becomes a more detailed project. Oftentimes, supply chain executives need just something directional to start with and then to make maybe a near-term decision. And then that would lead into maybe a larger analysis for a bigger decision.
Supply chain communities and professional organizations
Yeah, that's great. So, from professional organizations, supply chain and data science, I try to keep feeding both, a couple of hands too, like it's Twister. And so, there's a few supply chain organizations that I would highly recommend you all join at least one. One is CSCMP, Council for Supply Chain Management Professionals. The other is ASCM, the Association for Supply Chain Management. I have my local chapter water bottle here. And the third is the Institute for Supply Management, ISM. So, wherever you live, there's probably a chapter for at least one of those. And just join and make it part of your professional growth to attend their functions. And you're going to meet people who, maybe they're in data, maybe they've completely in the operational world. But you get to learn more about other companies, other functions, and really commit yourself to improving your knowledge and experience in the supply chain side of the job.
From the data side, I'm an Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. It's the big professional organization for operations research folks. I'm an INFORMS member and a member of a couple local data organizations here in Minneapolis. Awesome. Yeah, INFORMS is great. I wanted to put that out there. They also have local chapters and there's the women's chapters, which is very unfortunately called WORMS, W-O-R-M-S. But super, super great thing to be a part of, especially if you are a student and you're moving from school world into the real world and you want to be a part of the ORMS. But also business analytics. There's a whole business analytics section of INFORMS and they have their own conference. So, anybody here who's in business intelligence or business analytics, there's also a place for you in INFORMS. So, I would highly recommend checking it out.
Keeping skills current and using Shiny
Yeah, it's a great question. So, part of it is just you learn as you go, right? And as you take on new clients and maybe new industries or new types of problems that you may never seen before, there's going to be a learning there. But the biggest thing, and this is just broadly advice, is just read. Read a ton. I would say that if you are not committing yourself to some level of professional reading every day, or at least a few times a week, you're probably going to be falling behind. And so, especially if you're maybe moving into the business world, you can get a ton of information just from reading old textbooks that are cheap or free online, reading the business section of the local newspaper every single day. If you are reading, like for new clients, I will always read their 10K, their annual report prior to our initial call, because that tells you a lot about what their business looks like and some of the challenges they're facing. Literacy is a great thing, right? It makes the world's wisdom available to you right away. So, highly recommend that.
How do you use Shiny? Oh, I am a big believer in Shiny. So, generally, as part of our offerings in a project, we'll say at the end, we want to put a Shiny app of the results so that, you know, we'll give you a PowerPoint presentation and things like that. But you're going to want more details. You're going to want to have specific questions. So, here's this thing that you can look through, look at the details, and it's very well-received. Huge fan of Leaflet for mapping and all the different solutions for tables and graphics within ggplot. And then pop it up on shinyapps.io. It's very straightforward to do that.
Yes, lots of votes for Shiny in the chat. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Ralph. Thank you, everybody, for hanging out with us. We will see you all next Thursday, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.