Eating My Own Dog Food

I write for the Supply Chain Leader. My goal is to help business visionaries gain first-mover advantage. In my position I am lucky enough to work with a team to create quantitative studies, execute qualitative research projects and benchmark companies on their supply chain practices. Throughout this work I am plagued with the question of "What is supply chain excellence?" The more that I study the subject, the larger the question mark becomes in my mind.

When I attend conferences, and I hear others talk about "best-in-class" processes, I have to fight to not raise my hand and ask, "How do you know that these processes are best-in-class?" Or when I hear a software vendor promise a client a lofty, yet hefty, value proposition, I squirm in my chair. It is all I can do to now open my mouth and ask a pointed question.

Bottom line: I don't think we know what drives value. There is much folklore. I think that the industry has been hijacked by software vendors trying to sell their solutions, consultants pushing six- and seven-figure projects, trade groups promoting conferences, and industry consortia trying to survive. I want to know more. I am not sure why I am driven to know more, but I am.

Eating My Own Dog Food

The phrase "eating your own dog food" is slang. The term is used to refer to a company that uses its own product to test and promote its product. This is my journey. Five years ago I started work on the Supply Chains to Admire and supply chain improvement as measured by the Supply Chain Index. I framed the research project on a series of hypotheses based on my last decade as an industry analyst. It is driven by what I know. I don't know the answers to the questions that I do not know to ask.

Over the last year I have been studying the emerging world of analytics. I am fascinated by the shift in analytics from 'Schema on Write' to 'Schema on Read'. In this process, I have been thinking about my work on supply chain excellence. I, like everyone else I know, am biased. So my question was, "If I placed all of my data--the 15 years of financial ratio data for public companies, my 6751 responses from the 77 quantitative surveys, along with market data--into a data lake and started mining the data for patterns, what would I find? Can I discover even greater insights on the patterns of supply chain leadership and the impact of the choices that they made on balance sheet results? Can I answer the questions that I don't know to ask? What would I learn by mining the unstructured data from all of my open-end responses from the 77 surveys?"

This is my journey. I do not want to regurgitate other's content. Instead, I want to help supply chain leaders gain a greater understanding of what drives supply chain excellence. So over the next quarter, with help from Cloudera, the team at Supply Chain Insights will be trying to answer the questions we don't know to ask. And in the process, critically examining our own work. We will hold it up to the light of the greater community for all to question. The project is enabled through use of the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub along with Trifacta for data wrangling, Arcadia Data Visualization, and DataRobot to understand the patterns.

I am fascinated. I want to better understand the world of data science and question my own work. Along the way, I will share my story. I don't know what I don't know today. I am unconsciously incompetent. Like many of you, the world of unstructured data, data mining, and machine learning is new to me. But if I can use the tools on my own data, and learn along the way, my goal is to help the greater community learn. I am no longer content to just write about the subject. I feel that it is time to roll up my sleeves and eat my own dog food.

Where Can You Find More?

I will publish openly as I learn. I believe we learn more from failure than success so you will get to see the slips, starts and insights through my LinkedIn blog. In the process, it is my goal to also share greater insights on the Supply Chains to Admire and supply chain improvement at the Supply Chain Insights Global Summit on September 5-8, 2017 in Greensboro, GA. If you cannot make the event, we will live cast the presentations. I not only intend to eat my own dog food, I want to make it available to the world. This is my big hairy-a$$ goal.