Opalytics
Deeper Insights Driving More Value from Supply Chain

Advanced analytics remain a crucial lever for uncovering and achieving greater return from your value network. While for years, this has been left in back office “skunk works,” Opalytics has put advanced analytics within easy reach of the business user through the Opalytics Cloud Platform, an advanced analytics platform built to support better decisions for better results. This happens in two ways.

First, Opalytics offers powerful, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications that are business user-ready, provide for global collaboration, and are algorithmically robust, based on decades of thought leadership in supply chain analytics by Professor David Simchi- Levi, Chairman and Co-founder.

Second, the Opalytics Cloud Platform uniquely enables the customized development of industry-specific, company-specific, or situation-specific applications that can instantly be deployed to business users with the power of the Opalytics Cloud Platform, delivering scale, security, data visualization, and project collaboration.

COTS applications from Opalytics include Predictive Analytics, Network Design, Multi-echelon Inventory Optimization, Transportation Routing, and Network Risk. These apps enable business users to answer questions such as the following:

✓ How can I most accurately forecast demand, based on multiple factors?
✓ What are the meaningful segments in my demand, and how should I align my fulfillment capabilities?
✓ Can I provide the same service for lower total cost if I consolidate my supply chain structure?
✓ Where should I consider adding more capacity?
✓ Is product flowing through my network in the best way?
✓ How should I integrate the supply chain of a new acquisition with what I already have?
✓ How will my supply chain be able to respond if demand suddenly increases? What if it decreases?
✓ How can I identify supply chain risk and engineer a more robust value network?

As an example of what we do, Opalytics evaluates the dynamics of your supply chain and determines its optimal structure and flow

✓ I have a hub and spoke or multi-stage supply chain. What is the best level of safety stock to have of each item at each location?
✓ What are the optimal multi-stop routes for my LTL shipments?
✓ When new challenges face my business, what are the alternatives and tradeoffs that I need to consider? Which options are best and why?

In the past, many of these questions were left un-answered as business mangers used intuition or oversimplified spreadsheet models because there was no time to adequately consider all the relevant goals and constraints. “Opalytics solves this by putting the power of advanced analytics into off-the-shelf cloud apps for the business user that are easy to learn and share,” says Edith Simchi-Levi.

But Opalytics is more than COTS cloud apps. It is a new kind of platform– an advanced analytics platform in the cloud. There are many times when the need for competitive advantage dictates that decisions are made that can’t be answered with any COTS app because the considerations are very specific. These challenges may require predictive or prescriptive analytics or both. The Opalytics Cloud Platform enables operations researchers or data scientists to rapidly develop a model and then instantly deploy it as a fully functional cloud application for business users, complete with data and user security, built-in data visualization, and global collaboration, all with computing at scale. For the business user, this means rapid access to advanced analytics that they can use reliably and repeatedly.

So, whether you need a powerful, but user-friendly, off-the-shelf application or a customized model and application, Opalytics delivers both with the Opalytics Cloud Platform.