Management Archives – Michel Baudin's Blog

Building-the-team-The-Doudna-Charpentier-collaboration-is-sealed-on-the-steps-of-Stanley2

Aug 29 2021

Distributed Teams Can Work After All

The 2012 paper in Science about the CRISPR/Cas9 system has been hailed as the greatest breakthrough in biology since Crick and Watson’s discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953. It has earned its two Principal Investigators (PI), Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry. Laypersons cannot really follow this paper but what we can better understand is how the research team worked. And it is remarkable.

By Michel Baudin • Management • 1 • Tags: Project management, Team

Jul 30 2021

Evaluating Sales Forecasts — Part II

The lively response to last week’s post on this topic prompted me to dig deeper. First, I take a shot at clarifying the distinction between point forecasts and probability forecasts. Second, I present the idea behind the accuracy metric for probability forecasts that Stefan de Kok recommends as an alternative to the WSPL. Finally, I summarize a few points raised in discussions on LinkedIn and in this blog.

All of this is about evaluating forecasts. We still need methods to generate them. There are many well-known, published methods for point forecasts but not for probability forecasts, particularly for sales. This is a topic for another post.

By Michel Baudin • Metrics • 2 • Tags: Probability Forecast, Sales forecast

Jul 16 2021

Evaluating Sales Forecasts

When sizing a new factory or production line, or when setting work hours for the next three months, most manufacturers have no choice but to rely on sales forecasts as a basis for decisions.

But how far can you trust sales forecasts? You use a training set of data to fit a particular model and a testing set of actual data observed over a time horizon of interest following the end of the training set period. The training set may, for example, cover 5 years of data about product sales up to June 30, 2021, and the testing set the actual sales in July, 2021.

The forecasters’ first concern is to establish how well a method works on the testing set so that the decision makers can rely on it for the future. For this, they need metrics that reflect end results and that end-users of forecasts can understand. You cannot assume that they are up to speed or interested in forecasting technology.

Forecasters also need to compare the performance of different algorithms and to monitor the progress of an algorithm as it “learns,” and only they need to understand the metrics they use for this purpose.

By Michel Baudin • Metrics • 11 • Tags: Kanban, Production planning, Sales forecast

Jan 5 2021

Deep Learning And Profound Knowledge

[The featured image is Maureen Mace’s Tree of Knowledge]

In the news, Deep Learning is the currently emblematic technology of Machine-Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In Management, the System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) is a framework by W. Edwards Deming that specifies what individuals should know to be effective leaders of business organizations.

Your knowledge is what you have learned. You would not call a deep lake profound but a deep thought is also profound and vice versa. When discussing abstractions, there is no daylight in meaning between deep and profound.

Consequently, we might expect Deep Learning to be the process by which you acquire Profound Knowledge but it is nothing of the kind. As technical terms, they are unrelated and neither one matches expectations based on common, everyday usage.

By Michel Baudin • Management • 9 • Tags: Case-Based Reasoning, CBR, Deep Learning, Deming, Explaination, Machine Learning, Neural Nets, Profound Knowledge, SoPK

Dec 15 2020

Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)

Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC) is a management approach. It’s about organizing the response to quality problems, not about the technical tools used to solve them. It is intended to help detect problems, solve them, and document solutions, thereby growing the skills of the workforce. QRQC neither mandates nor excludes mistake-proofing or any statistical/data science tool.

This is meant to introduce QRQC to those who have not heard of it but it is also a call for practitioners to correct any misperceptions, add details, or share their experience.

By Michel Baudin • Management • 8 • Tags: Faurecia, Lean Quality, Nissan, QRQC, Quality, Quality Assurance, Valeo

Dec 7 2020

More About VSMs From Jeffrey Liker

Thanks to Jeffrey Liker for providing additional details on the transformation of this tool. Initially, Toyota used it occasionally with suppliers. The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) turned it into the Value Stream Maps (VSM) that it has promoted as foundational to Lean.

By Michel Baudin • Management • 4 • Tags: Information Flow, Lean, Marerials and Information Flow, Material Flow, MIFA, MIFD, TPS, VSM

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Distributed Teams Can Work After All

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Evaluating Sales Forecasts — Part II

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Distributed Teams Can Work After All

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Evaluating Sales Forecasts — Part II

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Evaluating Sales Forecasts

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Deep Learning And Profound Knowledge

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Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)

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