The Essence of Supply Chains

Supply chains, the beautiful yet complex orchestration of getting things sourced, built, and distributed into our lives, run on decisions. 

Decisions made with imperfect information, decisions made either years ahead or within seconds. These decisions ultimately determine whether you have a satisfied customer or lose your market share to the competition. The supply chain professional is constantly faced with questions like: What should we do? When should we do it? Where should we do it? How should we do it? 

“Supply chains thrive or falter based on the quality of their decisions.”

The supply chain professional is constantly faced with questions like: What should we do? When should we do it? Where should we do it? How should we do it?

How Decisions Are Made Today

The challenges that supply chains have faced in recent years have exposed the decision-making limitations of many supply chains around the world. Stockouts and supply chain delays are the stories grabbing headlines.

Let’s look at how supply chain decisions are made today to understand why these problems exist. The answer for most supply chains: prepackaged software either in the form of an ERP, warehouse/order/transportation management system, or a planning suite.

All these software offerings are very good at digitizing a fixed supply chain workflow, but they are not good at making the smartest decision possible.

“Digitizing workflows is not enough—intelligent decision-making is the key.”

For that, supply chains have to go AI-first, and not AI-as-a-feature in workflow software. Going AI-first is about building as clear a view as possible of the future state with predictive models, and then building decision intelligence around this predicted future state. Also, the next generation of AI-first supply chains will look to collapse these two steps into a single step.

The Power of AI-First Supply Chains

AI-first supply chain operations have high-impact batch and real-time decision-making opportunities. AI-first is a strategy tech-forward companies have figured out (like Amazon, Instacart, Stitch Fix, Doordash, and more) and it has produced excellent results for these Internet-era supply chains. 

The key to being AI-first is using the best-in-class engineering infrastructure combined with a huge library of predictive models and math optimization models that will provide the best intelligence in the face of all kinds of supply chain uncertainty.

Our Journey to Lyric

The founding team at Lyric previously helped large companies on their supply chain AI journey (our previous startup, Opex Analytics).

We did this by helping them build custom AI products in every aspect of the supply chain such as inventory and order forensics, network planning, transportation, etc. using machine learning and mathematical optimization models. However, we learned that it is hard to transition from building stand-alone AI applications to transforming them into AI-first supply chains. There were two key related reasons: 

1. Building AI products was slow and expensive, and

2. Becoming AI-first required a lot of experimentation – you have to play with AI, and that was not feasible given how slow and expensive it was to build AI products

“Experimentation is the heart of innovation—but it must be accessible and efficient.”

We founded Lyric to solve this problem.

How Lyric is Transforming Supply Chains

At Lyric, our mission is to help every company transition to AI-first supply chains. We do this by converting your team from being consumers of technology to creators of AI technology.

How, you may ask? It’s quite simple. By offering:

• A flexible platform that enables data scientists, operations research specialists, supply chain engineers, and supply chain planners to collaborate and build powerful and easy-to-use products for the business.

• A catalog of pre-built products that can be used by supply chain engineers and analysts in your business as-is or combined like building blocks to construct scalable, sophisticated decision products.

“Lyric empowers teams to become creators of AI technology, not just consumers.”

The Lyric Studio is rich in supply chain AI content and delivers the ability to go from idea to product at blazing speeds. Your team can create AI models faster than they can build spreadsheet models.  Your teams can now test ideas quickly and deploy only products that create value. 

A Shared Vision for the Future

We are thrilled to introduce Lyric to the world. We have big dreams about where supply chains can be with this approach and technology. We would love to work with others who are excited by this vision!

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, let’s talk. And if you’re a driven, ambitious individual looking to be a part of a dynamic team, reach out to us.

 “The future of supply chains is AI-first. Let’s build it together.”

~Ganesh & the team at Lyric