Sienci Labs: Managing Production (Push or Pull?)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case study describes the dilemma of Kye Allen, inventory and logistics manager at Sienci Labs (SL), a small business in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, founded in 2016. SL assembled and sold CNC machines to hobbyists and small business owners. In May of 2022, SL had been struggling with supply disruptions and inventory problems that caused lengthy delays in product shipments. Allen had been working on preparing the new MRP (Material Requirements Planning) system for implementation to fix these problems and was almost ready to go live. At the same time, they just launched an applied research project to optimize SL’s production capacity based on lean production principles under the guidance of Allen’s former professor Fatih Yegul along with Stephen Thomson, Director Centre for Supply Chain Innovation at Conestoga College. With the new MRP system, Allen aimed to control the assembly operations on the shop floor and have a firm grip on the supply of raw materials and parts. Most MRP systems, by design, assume a make-to-stock environment and tend to push production flow through work orders issued to shop floor employees. However, in the first weekly meeting of the research project, Yegul and Thomson asked Allen to explore the feasibility of moving to a visual make-to-order production management system based on pull principles instead of using work orders. That would require a radical shift in Allen’s plans, but a pull system also had several advantages. Allen was in favour of the pull system but wasn’t sure if it was the right time to switch to a make-to-order approach when the company was in the middle of an MRP implementation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".