Episode Details

Ali Raza and Joe Lynch discuss demand planning in VUCA times. Ali is the Founder and CEO of Throughput, where he and his team help companies realize greater output and free cash flow.

Ali Raza is the Founder and CEO of Throughput, Inc., an AI-Powered software to help companies run leaner, faster, smoother, and safer operations out of the box. Ali comes from a deep academic and real-world industrial operations in process simulations and operations management. He has managed onshore/offshore/war zone logistics as well as batch, continuous, and discrete manufacturing setups. At Schlumberger, he became one of the youngest Geomarket Production Services, pioneering 3 projects and serving 50+ industrial clients. His production teams were responsible for billions of dollars of hydrocarbon output to the global economy. Ali joined his first tech startup while still an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he has been eliminating one global bottleneck after another, with his current focus on optimizing supply chains that extend to Mars.

ThroughPut Inc. is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Supply Chain pioneer that enables companies to optimize their Operations by leveraging their existing Data Systems to increase Output, Quality and Profitability across their entire enterprise. ThroughPut's AI software, ELI, includes the only Bottleneck Management System (BMS) that utilizes existing enterprise data systems, such as ERP, MES, IMS, TMS, WMS, PLC, EAM, POS, CRM, SCADA, Historian, and other data systems, to solve for the $25 Trillion of annual Waste across global supply chains already today. Such constraints to the $90 Trillion global Economy could otherwise be dedicated to more productive, useful and sustainable purposes for the benefit of all stakeholders and communities. ThroughPut's AI software is designed by Fortune 500 Supply Chain & Logistics leaders, Silicon Valley AI and Analytics pioneers, and top global Operations Experts in the areas of the Theory of Constraints, Lean Manufacturing, Supply Chain Automation, Total Quality Management, and over four-dozen other leading best practices now digitized as part of the ELI software, with hundreds of years of hands-on experience in the space.

• Ali Raza is the Founder and CEO of Throughput, where he and his team help companies realize greater output and free cash flow.
• This episode is actually a webinar hosted by Joe Lynch, featuring Ali Raza discussing demand planning in VUCA times.
• Demand planning is a supply chain management process that enables a company to project future demand and successfully customize company output — be it toilet paper, laptops or truck capacity — according to those projections.
• The demand planning process typically involves:
  • Collecting, organizing and preparing data
  • Creating a preliminary forecast
  • Integrating market data
  • Reconciling bottom-up and top-down forecasts
  • Creating a final forecast
  • Using analytics to monitor forecast vs actual and adjust accordingly
• Demand planning is never easy, but in VUCA times, it becomes practically impossible because the demand and capacity signals are subject to Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA).
• In the webinar, Ali Raza, Founder and CEO of ThroughPut explains how demand sensing wit