Leslie Paulson is the Division Vice President and General Manager of PTC’s Servigistics Business Unit. She has global responsibility for service parts management, optimization, analytics and pricing solutions. Leslie is leading an era of rapid technology innovation delivering unprecedented capabilities for synchronizing supply and demand for service parts and optimizing operational excellence. Previously, Leslie retired from Caterpillar, Inc. after 29 years of service across a variety of executive roles in engineering, manufacturing, strategic planning, M&A, human resources, IT, logistics, and marketing. She is a graduate of Southern Illinois University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in mechanical engineering and also a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from Bradley University. She is also a graduate of Caterpillar’s Executive Leadership Program at Stanford University.
Dr. Vipul Agrawal is Vice President of Servigistics Product Management at PTC, and has the principal responsibility for accelerating advanced data science-driven product innovation. He has conducted pioneering research, consulting, and software development for more than 20 years in supply chain optimization with a special focus on service parts. He co-founded MCA Solutions (with Professor Dr. Morris Cohen) which became part of Servigistics in 2010 and part of PTC in 2012. Through his leadership the first large-scale multi-echelon optimization-based planning system was brought to market. He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Interfaces, Operations Research, and Naval Research Logistics and has been a principal investigator on two NSF-funded innovation research awards. Formerly, Vipul was an assistant professor at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He received an MS in IE from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Service supply chains make our economy and daily lives possible. These supply chains span many industries, including transportation, computing, telecommunications, healthcare, defense, construction, agriculture, building, factory equipment, and more. The complexity of these supply chains is staggering, with each consisting of hundreds or thousands of intricately interconnected locations with inventory investments ranging from $200M-$2B for major equipment manufacturers and operators. When equipment requires service, the service parts are needed within minutes/hours of the failure, an impossible feat made possible through advanced technology. Servigistics, the leading service supply chain optimization solution, helps ensure service parts are available in the right place, quantity, and price. With sophisticated algorithms and advanced data science, Servigistics recommends what parts to buy, repair, and move around the supply chain, tuned to maximize equipment availability and readiness. These data science methodologies include statistics, machine learning, and operations research. Servigistics is a pioneer of industrial AI enabling autonomous optimization of complex service supply chains involving millions of decisions every day without user intervention. This talk describes the mission of AI-driven autonomous planning, explains how Servigistics is at the cutting edge of innovation, offers an overview of data science applications used, and explains the success factors and challenges in Industrial AI.