Machine Learning - For Supply Chain ERP

Machine learning has seen a rise in popularity - from popular fiction to autonomous driving to bot chat. Does it have any applicability to boring Enterprise Resource Planning - especially for Supply Chain?

The answer is a boring "yes, of course". Supply Chain is the art and science of making sure factories are humming 24/7 and  that logistics is delivering optimally and predictably.

If you examined most of the Supply Chain ERP modules from Oracle/Netsuite, SAP, Infor, etc, they basically have broken down their solutions into four silos : Suppliers, Logistics, Factory, and Warehousing.

How can machine learning be applied to Supply Chain ERP? Here is a glimpse of the now (descriptive) and the future (prescriptive)

Descriptive explains WHAT HAPPENED. Predictive provides advance data on WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN. Prescriptive offers WHAT SHOULD YOU DO. 

CloudPassage Halo - What Is It?

IT Security For Cloud Deployment - Why?

Cloud is great : it gives you compute, storage, and networking for your development (write the app), stage (test the app), and  deployment (release the app to the public) needs.  Cloud is everyone's friend. The cloud is flexible, too. You (development, test, deploy) can scale, provision, shift needed resources to make sure you can do your job  - all from the comfort of a push of a few buttons.

But there is also a burden on this flexibility. Sky rocketing cost with uncontrolled access to this cloud resource. Worse yet, hackers might also join your party - and ruin it! What to do???

The answer is : Cloud IT Policy Compliance & Security

IT Security, Compliance, Policies : this thin layers ensures that the right people (Joe in dev) gets his resources will the look-loos (Sally in Finance) does not. Also it prevents Hacker from hijacking your resource, and worse yet, DATA!

Yup. Sounds boring. I would rather write Swift code that interfaces with a popular social media site via a Restful API, sell ads, and drink martinis. But your finance department (hey, maybe even your IT boss) will breathe down your neck to make sure you reign in control - and security.

How do you do this? Easy. Add a near invisible layer to your "stack". A quiet little daemon that helps you manage all this. And it won't tax your existing resources because the heavy lifting is done in our cloud.

Cloud IT Policy Compliance & Security allows you to secure and control your precious resources. It is done silently (won't tax your resources), smartly (analytics done separately in the cloud). So simultaneously can met your SECURITY & FINANCIAL goals!

I know of a few vendors who are proven in this arena. Give me a gingle and we can talk!

Shopping Recommendation System - Using Apriori Algorithm To Find Association

An application of Big Data in the marketing world is to 1) find out what customers usually buy together 2) use that as a recommendation to the customer. In order to build a recommendation system, data from previous purchases need to be collected and analyzed so that a recommendation system can be created.

Let's say you own a grocery store Al's Local Mart (ALM). You want to increase sales. You read that big data can bring big sales.  You are willing to re-shuffle product placement in your grocery store to do that. But how should products be re-shuffled to increase sales.

One way to re-shuffle product is put items close to each other - items that are often purchased together. A common example is cereal and milk. Now you want to implement this for other products.

You start to collect data on grocery sales in your mart. You write down on a piece of paper what was bought : (M)ilk, (O)ranges, (N)ectarines, (K)ola, (E)thiopian Coffee, (Y)ellow Banana.

Hand implementation of the Apriori Algorithm to find association of items in Market Basket Analysis.

In addition to the raw data of what was bought together, you will also need to define what Minimum Support Threshold to use to create the recommendation system. The higher the number, the more obvious the association has to be for it to be recognized.

It the first table on the right, the number of times an item is purchased is listed. Those that don't occur often (in accordance with the threshold) are eliminated. I made this number high so that I can reduce the number of hand iterations. In the 2nd table on the right, combinations of items are tallied, and those below the threshold are eliminated. The last table factorizes all of the remaining associations. The most common association is : (O)ranges, (K)ola, and (E)thiopian Coffee are usually bought together.

As a grocer, you can now place (O)range, (K)ola, (E)thiopian Coffee close together. Or you can make a recommendation at the check out counter. Either way, your chance of increasing sales is good.

VMWare Overview - By Personas

Find VMWare original virtualization software products and suites a bit confusing? Here is one that looks at "not what it does", but rather "who can use it".

Starting with "who are you", this diagram shows you which VMWare suite is for you.

Tradeshift : A Buyer To Seller ECommerce Document Sharing Platform

The cloud has enabled a platform for software modules and people network to connect and transaction.

A particular application of a cloud platform is for sellers of parts and buyers of parts (B2B) to transaction much more easily (e-commerce). Reducing transaction cost has always been a harbinger of greater trade (much like reducing tax or barriers). 

While Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) receives much credit for revolutionizing the B2B e-commerce world, connecting China manufactures with buyers around the planet - other smaller companies are also playing in adjacent space. One such example is Tradeshift.

Tradeshift has a cloud platform that allows for e-commerce documents to be shared easily between sellers and buyers. You might think "e-commerce document sharing" is boring, but anything that  streamlines mundane transactions deserves a drink of coffee.

In the scenario below, you have a seller of tires "Parts Producer", and you have buyer of tires "Factory".  In step 1, the Factory orders 100 tires. Step 2, the Parts Producer recognizes that Factory is a known customer with good credit and ships 100 tires. Step 3, Parts Producer sends an Invoice to Factory to pay up for the 100 tires. Step 4, Factory checks to make sure that the tires did arrive and wires funds to Part Producer.

Now, wouldn't be nice if all of this was automated - so that no paper needs to be shuffled around, found, updated, be kept consistent between Parts Producer and Factory (if the order changes, for example).

With Tradeshift, all this is automated!

Tradeshift has a platform (cloud software and database) and a network (buyers and sellers) so that a document tracking orders, shipment, invoice, and payment can be put in one place for all to see. Thanks cloud!

IT Security - A Quick Introduction

You Information And Laptop Under Constant Attack

Your information (username, password, social security number) is needed for you to do business on the web (shopping, paying bills, check status of work). But it is also a piece of information highly valued by internet bad people. So they will do anything they can to steal it. From the comfort of their living rooms.

The internet bad people want to steal your 1. information 2. resource such as your laptop.

Steal Your Information:

There are multiple ways for internet bad people to steal your information. I have broken it down to how you might fall pray - by the first point of contact.

1. Email spear phishing via social engineering

The internet bad people will look up your public information (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, ...), find out who your friends and family might be, then write you a convincing email to get you to respond or click.


2. Visiting website that are malicious

You might be led to enter a malicious website created by the internet bad people to look like a legitimate web site - so that you will enter your private information (username, password, SSN).

3. Malware

Malware is a bad program created by the internet bad people. It is some how downloaded on your laptop or mobile device (accidentally or through trickery). Once the bad program is installed, it can do many bad things. It can spy on your keystrokes to steal your username and password. It can turn on your laptop camera to peek at your. It can turn on the microphone to record you. It can even sabotage your laptop by draining your battery or overheat your laptop and potential start a fire.

4. Fake App

Perhaps a close cousin of the malware - a fake app is an app that you download that appears to be legitimate (a free game downloaded directly from a website instead of downloading from Apple iTunes Store or Google Play Store). During the fake app installation, it will ask you for permission into your personal information stored on your device. Once you give it permission, the fake app can siphon your personal information as you are using the fake app (games, etc).


Hijack Your Laptop:


1. Ransomware


Ransomware is a program that you accidentally or was tricked into downloading into your laptop or mobile device. Rather than stealing your information, the ransomware locks you out of your device. The only way to unlock your device is to pay the internet bad guys. Once payment is received, you will receive a passcode to unlock your device.

2. Virus, Bot

The internet bad people need resources (free laptops) to help them carry on their bad deed. One way they obtain resources is to somehow trick laptop owners to download a virus (email attachment that looks legitimate, download a file from a website). Once the virus is installed in a laptop, it will 1. find ways to plant itself in another laptop 2. wait for commands from the internet bad people. One of the common commands is to jam a website with infinite web requests from millions of virus infected laptop. The web server under attacked won't be able to handle the requests and the web server will be disabled. This is called Denial of Service (DoS) attack.



What To Do?

What can you do to reduce the likely of being impacted by these attacks?  One method is to use a firewall to watch and block potential threats from the internet bad people.

Firewall comes in two flavors : in software and in hardware.

Software Firewall

Built into most operating systems is the ability to setup simple firewalls.  Here is an example of the MacOS firewall:

MacOS firewall gives your program (Microsoft Excel) and service level (File Sharing) control.

Hardware Firewall

Hardware firewalls are usually physically included in a router. There are different approaches to how firewalls are implemented in hardware.

1. Stateless packet filtering (flow based)

As packet flows through the router, the firewall inspects the packets  individually, without regard to the bigger picture of what is happening. So this is a good start, but not very effective.

2. State packet filtering (flow based)

As packets flow through the router, the firewall determines the connection state before inspecting the packets. The connection state is based on TCP state.


3. Application (proxy based)

This approach takes all the packets, build up the final data view (document, picture, message, etc) and examines the data from the application point of view.