Hello, and welcome to this lesson which will introduce the concept of machine learning,
and how you can apply machine learning to specific tasks and business and accountancy.
In particular, we're going to look at supply chains and how the advance of technology,
and the growth of data continue to revolutionize the way
supply chains are analyzed and optimized.
And how this is going to continue into the future.
So, what I want you to see after this lesson is,
what are supply chains,
and how are they important to modern business.
Understand how they've become highly digitized,
and to be able to think about
how future technological changes will drive future innovation in supply chain management.
Now, even if you're not interested in supply chain,
this is an excellent demonstration of how data
and technology are revolutionizing something that is critical to modern business.
And thus can be used as a case study for other areas in modern business,
to understand how data and technology are going to change those areas as well.
So, there's really just one thing I want you
to do and that's read this digital supply chain.
There's a web page that is put together by Ernsten Young,
that talks about this growth of data and how it's changing things.
And in particular, how this is impacting the supply chain.
If you manufacture something as a company,
you're going to need to buy the input parts or components.
And you're also likely selling your product to either consumers or to other businesses.
Either way, you're going to have to manage
the supply of the material for you to make your product,
as well as manage the supply of your product to the end user.
That's fundamentally the idea of supply chain management.
As the technology becomes more complex in terms of building advanced components,
the supply chain can get more complex as well.
And so it's important to think about how to manage
data both internally from your company,
as well as those of your partner companies in order to manage
this complex data chain more effectively.
You also have to deal with outside issues such as political issues.
If you have products coming from another country into the United States,
or from the United States into other countries,
or between third party countries,
that just increases the complexity of the management problem.
Now this website isn't the main thing you need to read about,
it's just to give you a bit of a feel.
There actually is a full article that I want you to read, it's not too long.
And it basically gives you more detailed invested investigation into supply chain data,
and where all this data is coming from,
and how you can use technology to improve the management of all of this.
So I want you read through this and get a better feel for this overall concept.
If you have any questions, let us know.
Feel free to reach out on the course forum both
to the instructional staff as well as your fellow students to
comment and discuss some of the things you see and read in these particular articles.
If you have any questions, let us know. And good luck.