Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What information are you extracting?

Shariq Mansoor: All the supply chain intelligence. Our definition of supply chain is not just sending packages to your customers. Our supply chain is your entire company from the moment you have a demand, to manufacturing, purchasing, and to everything that happens in between. What this means is, we go after these big systems and we have these crawlers that extract all the sales data and historical data of how they’re running their business. It’s all automated.

Once it’s extracted, we start putting all the correlation and algorithms that we have developed on top of the data. From there, we start figuring things out. Then it uses our cognitive engine, which is based on machine learning, to figure out what is going to happen. We apply all these algorithms and not just one algorithm. We apply 20 to 30 algorithms on every SKU on every location.

If you figure it out for certain products, you have a seasonality curve. All these patterns are recognized inside it. It predicts, based on those behaviors, what the demand is going to be. Earlier, people used to do it on an aggregate level. What happens then is that you tend to miss specific information of the location.

Sramana Mitra: Is the compute power on your end?

Shariq Mansoor: We just extract data from their system. Google has the compute power. They build the algorithms. We’re doing the same thing. The only thing we need from the customer is their data. Our technology can crawl the system within a matter of days.

Sramana Mitra: Who are the consumers of your predictions in the organization?

Shariq Mansoor: One of the other things that we are doing differently is, we are breaking the barriers between silos. We are looking more from a business problem perspective. If you take this example of demand forecasting, we have people from planning, sales and operations, product managers, and executives looking at the business problem. Think of it this way. I can do a better demand forecast, but what are you doing to do with it?

Sramana Mitra: The truth is each of these functional areas have different views that they want to look at. If I’m a product manager, I want to look at the demand forecast for my product. If I’m in supply chain, I’m looking at different components.

Shariq Mansoor: We take care from every level: down from the transaction to the highest level.

Sramana Mitra: You do provide customized dashboards.

Shariq Mansoor: They can see it. They can slice this information the way they want to look at it. You have plant managers coming in. They’re looking at a different level. You have product managers. They’re looking at it from a product standpoint. You have a CEO who’s looking at it from a company standpoint. One of the more important things that we do is we do not just stop and say, “Here’s a better forecast.”

We actually tell them what they can do with that forecast. At the end of the day, you may be trying to optimize your working capital or eliminate excess inventory. That is where we focus. Demand forecasting is one of the things we do. We are very different. We are not just giving more tools to the customers. At the end of the day, the model is changing in the world right now. When we talk about SaaS, it is not just more tools.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor
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