How a Mid-Sized Firm is Shrinking Inventory Carryovers 50% with AI
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For more than 10 years, NMK Textile Mills has manufactured bed linens for major retailers in the United States and Canada. As e-commerce exploded, the company’s co-founder saw an opportunity to grow the business. So, in addition to manufacturing bed linens wholesale for retail customers, NMK Textile Mills reworked its complete supply chain to manufacture products for California Design Den, which became an e-commerce retailer selling its own fashion-forward products directly to consumers online.
With California Design Den’s push into e-commerce, it became apparent the SMB company (with about 250 global employees) faced the same tough supply chain questions as large retail customers, including maintaining enough inventory to meet customer demand in a timely, efficient way.
California Design Den depended upon a myriad of systems to track its complex forecasting and reordering processes. Team members typically planned inventory manually using desktop spreadsheet software, which could lead to excess inventory. Accurately forecasting demand and supply was essential to the company’s financial success—but it was also a challenge.
A couple years ago, California Design Den partnered with Pluto7, a technology solutions provider that offers a software as a service (SaaS) called Planning In A Box. Leveraging Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, Planning In A Box intelligently helps predict demand and balances it with supply.
But that was just the beginning. “Along the way, we realized that to compete with larger retailers, make quicker decisions, and move faster, we needed to go further,” says Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer at California Design Den.
With guidance from Pluto7, California Design Den began migrating its database to Google Cloud Platform. Using Google BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud SQL, and Google Cloud Storage, and experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, the company is reducing inventory carryovers by more than 50%, improving the accuracy of demand planning quarter over quarter, and gaining granular insights into how individual SKUs are performing.
“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels. With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”
—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den
No need for army of data scientists
“Using Google Cloud Platform machine learning and AI was essential for California Design Den if it was to compete successfully with larger retailers,” Deepak says.
For example, tastes and fashions in bed linens can change quickly and consumer prices fluctuate. With more than 2,500 SKUs, it wasn’t possible for California Design Den’s team to continuously monitor product demand and experiment with competitive pricing in real time.
“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels,” says Deepak. “With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”
By integrating all its data onto Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den’s team gains deeper insights into product sales over time, which in turn helps the company improve demand planning by better determining which styles to manufacture and sell in the future.
“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge leaves with them. By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”
—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den
Merging visuals with data
Before Google Cloud Platform, team members had to dig through spreadsheets and run scenarios to get a sense of how particular products had sold. The next step was to perform keyword searches across the company’s photo library in the cloud to find each product’s image. From there, a team member would insert the product images into a presentation, along with relevant data points, to provide a report for stakeholders on how particular styles performed.
Today, California Design Den, with the help of Pluto7, is integrating its entire product image library with its database on Google Cloud Platform. Experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, California Design Den is moving towards a day when team members can run sales scenarios and get deep background data on individual product performance while viewing images of the relevant products.
Merging product visuals with data will help designers and team members better understand sales patterns over time and in context. In the past, making correlations between things like which sheet colors sold well in California, compared to how the same sheet colors performed on the East Coast, was something that California Design Den employees primarily did in their heads.
“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge goes with them,” says Manjunath Devadas, Founder and CEO at Pluto7. “By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”
“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything.”
—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den
Reimagining supply-demand balancing
Pluto7’s mission statement is to democratize supply demand balancing with machine learning and AI. California Design Den is a case in point, as the combination of Planning In A Box and Google Cloud Platform gives the company greater control over its destiny.
“Big retailers used to tell us what to manufacture and how much they would pay for it,” says Deepak. “That was our primary business, and if we didn’t accept the terms, a competitor would.” Today, in addition to continuing to make products for retailers, California Design Den can design, make, and sell a variety of designs for itself, including custom and limited-edition products, thanks to Google Cloud Platform and Pluto7 software offerings. The payoff is not only in having a more diversified business. California Design Den also receives more favorable profit margins by selling its own products.
“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything,” Deepak says. “We can make smaller batches. We can connect directly with consumers. We can identify the missing pieces—what should we produce next, when, and how much? We otherwise couldn’t afford the level of talent it would take to do this.”
Cutting through the noise
Google and Pluto7 software helped California Design Den reduce inventory carryovers by more than 50%. Inventory tracking and distribution, along with insights and visibility into product sales, are faster, more efficient, and accurate. Google Cloud Platform flexible pricing, speed, reliability, security, and scalability enable California Design Den to stay relevant and be more competitive.
In addition to benefiting from Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den relies on G Suite—also part of Google Cloud—to enhance collaboration among its global teams. Previously, the company’s email server would sometimes crash, due to the heavy load of sharing product photos and other data. “Gmail and Google Drive handle the everyday demands on the business effortlessly and reliably,” Deepak says.
“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important. We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”
—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den
The company is exploring additional ways to leverage Google Cloud Platform in the near future. For example, one possibility is to import customer reviews from sites where products are sold into Google BigQuery, and to use that data to perform sentiment analysis via Google Cloud Natural Language. It could provide another valuable data source to help California Design Den’s team decide where to focus future designs.
“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important,” Deepak says. “We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”
Three Data Insights That Set Marketing Leaders Apart from Marketing Laggards
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With insights directing the bulk of today’s marketing decisions, leading marketers are driving growth by embracing three core mindset shifts. Marketing leaders are working toward a holistic view of consumers; they are investing in machine learning to support their activities
1. Leading marketers are working toward a holistic view of consumers.
- 63% of leading marketers agree they are using KPIs to develop a single integrated view of the customer.
- 66% of leading marketers agree they should build teams for end-to-end customer experiences and journeys, across channels and devices.
- Marketing leaders are 60% more likely than laggards to believe that marketing teams should own a data-driven customer strategy that supports all organizational stakeholders.
2. Leading marketers are investing in machine learning to support their activities.
- Measurement-leaders are more than 2X as likely as their measurement-challenged counterparts to agree that their organization is already investing in automation and machine learning technologies to drive marketing activities.
- 75% of marketers who use machine learning to drive marketing activities said they were satisfied with how their KPIs inform and influence decision-making across their enterprise.
- 73% of marketing leaders who have invested in machine learning have shifted more than 10% of their time from manual activation to strategic insight generation.
3. Leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success.
- 66% of marketing leaders believe how companies apply their data will play a key role in their ability to thrive.
- 60% of leading marketers believe data-driven attribution is essential to understanding journeys of high-value customers.
- Marketing leaders are 53% more likely than laggards to say machine learning processes data signals to help marketers better understand consumer intent.
IBL Education’s GenAI-based chat mentor with Google
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With more than 6 years of experience in building open source and Generative AI in education at scale, ibleducation.com continues to evolve its approach and services. More recently, the company became an education-focused Vertex AI integrator. They provide enterprises and academic institutions with a platform to build, train and securely customize large language models (LLMs) for interactive mentors using Google’s Vertex AI.
“The education industry only recently began understanding the value of Generative AI with open source and the opportunities it presents,” says Miguel Amigot II, Chief Technology Officer at ibleducation.com. “We’re providing the chance to build a new type of learning, mentoring, and analytics platform that gives organizations total control over their training methods, data, and more, without locking into one vendor.”
Organizations large and small, including Fortune 500 companies and leading universities institutions, use ibleducation.com to support their learners, allow educators to develop coursework, and provide engineers with a solid platform to build on.rely on it to power their learning strategies.
Recently, ibleducation.com chose to partner with Google Cloud to improve its platform and scale beyond its base of millions of users.
Harnessing the power of GenAI in education and training
ibleducation.com initially began working with Google Cloud to unify its education data strategy to drive real-time and predictive analytics.
“Google Cloud outperforms others when it comes to maintaining control over algorithms and general data governance,” says Amigot. “We’re fortunate to be able to maintain ownership of our models while maintaining a pay-per-use pricing model. This is critical for our business. It allows our clients to avoid lower-value maintenance tasks, focus on innovation and user experience, and not worry about excessive costs.”
In the past, because of the high costs and need for AI and engineering talent to produce large language models, schools have been unable to take full advantage of open-source education technologies. Together, ibleducation.com and Google Cloud democratize access to AI-enabled tools for educators worldwide.
With a strong analytics and AI foundation, ibleducation.com has been able to personalize, translate, and create education content faster than before. This has been especially effective in improving accessibility, as automated translation and repurposing ensures those with visual and hearing impairments can interact with the content.
“Google Cloud enables us to reduce the total cost of building, running, and maintaining large language models by more than 70%,” says Amigot. “We’ve seen language model hosting costs decrease before, but nothing like this.”
Bringing AI-powered content creation to educators
Vertex AI has been especially useful in creating content, helping ibleducation.com to dramatically scale out its learning materials. Usage-based pricing mixed with an open-source model gives ibleducation.com the resources to support its users in developing evolving, valuable learning experiences to serve people worldwide.
Additionally, Google Cloud powers ibleducation.com’s Generative AI-based mentors, which provides a one-to-one learning experience to students and professionals looking for tailored skills development.
“The mission is to provide educators with a centralized system wherein they can manage everything from indexing data about customer courses to designing and facilitating UI/UX for users’ digital mentors,” says Amigot. “Google Cloud has helped us cover all of these bases.”
ibleducation.com allows users to create virtual mentors that provide personalized teaching, assess student knowledge, guide students through skills and learning paths, and offer robust learning analytics. Text-to-text and speech-to-speech interfaces can be offered over Slack, Discord, text message-based bots, web scripts, and LTI integrations.
“AI Mentor has been a very effective tool for our users because it adapts to the needs of educators and organizations very quickly,” says Amigot. “We’re seeing people use it for teaching assistance, marketing and administration, and a lot more. Vertex AI allows us to have many models for any variety of purposes.”
Looking forward, ibleducation.com is looking to continue taking personalized learning to new heights.
“From a mission standpoint, we want to expand to reach all the organizations not currently served by online education through our platform, analytics, and other AI-powered services,” says Amigot. “Our relationship with Google Cloud is instrumental in achieving our goal to democratize access to next-generation educational capabilities to more communities and organizations around the globe.”
Ready to take the next step? Join our upcoming GenAI workshop for higher education to learn how Google’s AI tools can help education institutions or explore our EdTech solutions to see how you can make education more personal, safe, and accessible with 100+ cutting-edge products.
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To make great products: do machine learning like the great engineer you are, not like the great machine learning expert you aren’t.
Most of the problems you will face are, in fact, engineering problems. Even with all the resources of a great machine learning expert, most of the gains come from great features, not great machine learning algorithms. So, the basic approach is:
- Make sure your pipeline is solid end to end.
- Start with a reasonable objective.
- Add common-sense features in a simple way.
- Make sure that your pipeline stays solid.
This approach will work well for a long period of time. Diverge from this approach only when there are no more simple tricks to get you any farther. Adding complexity slows future releases.
Once you’ve exhausted the simple tricks, cutting-edge machine learning might indeed be in your future. See the section on Phase III machine learning projects.
This document is arranged as follows:
- The first part should help you understand whether the time is right for building a machine learning system.
- The second part is about deploying your first pipeline.
- The third part is about launching and iterating while adding new features to your pipeline, how to evaluate models and training-serving skew.
- The final part is about what to do when you reach a plateau.
- Afterwards, there is a list of related work and an appendix with some background on the systems commonly used as examples in this document.
WayFair and Google Cloud Get Together to Raise the Bar on World-class Experience!
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On Dec 9th and 10th, Wayfair and Google Cloud came together for the inaugural Wayfair-Google Cloud Machine Learning Hackathon. Wayfair firmly believes that hackathons are a great way to fuel a culture of collaboration and experimentation. To fuel Wayfair’s incredible pace of innovation at scale, it’s team of more than 3,000 technologists is constantly experimenting and taking smart risks. It’s test-and-learn culture empowers everyone to think critically and creatively, and take big swings to raise the bar on its world-class experience.
The Wayfair-Google Cloud Machine Learning Hackathon was all about getting Wayfairians excited about and enabled on new technology. More specifically, this event was a contained test environment for Wayfair innovators to validate AI and ML tools in order to understand how to get better insight from their data. The projects worked on during this hackathon will help Wayfair build new use cases that could impact the business and the end customer in new and productive ways. Google Cloud’s focus for this Hackathon was to enable Wayfairains to harness the power of Machine Learning and AI to enable their own goals around continual improvement and relentless customer focus.
Prior to the event, Wayfair Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers who signed up and submitted ideas for the Hackathon were invited to optional Google Cloud enablement and training sessions. Google Cloud set up classrooms in Qwiklabs on topics including, but not limited to, BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Natural Language AI, so that all Hackathon participants could try out new technologies and tools in a learning environment. Google Cloud subject matter experts were available to field any questions Wayfairians had about the use cases they were hacking on.
The Hackathon was a hybrid virtual & physical event that hosted 67+ innovators, 49 of which registered for Google Cloud supported ideas. 15 judges from both Google Cloud and Wayfair oversaw the event. The esteemed list of judges included Steven Conine, Wayfair’s Co-Founder and Co-Chairman who has helped pave the way for the development of practical applications of next-generation technologies like augmented reality. The judges measured and evaluated the success of a project based on the following criteria:
- “Wow Factor”: How innovative is the project?
- Impact: How impactful is the project to Wayfair?
- Polish: How complete is the project?
- Presentation Quality: How clear and consistent is the demo?
The theme of the Hackathon was Machine Learning and AI. Teams were able to collaborate with participants globally, either in-person or virtually, and work together on projects in five categories: Relentless Customer Focus, Always Improving, Google’s Choice, People’s Choice, and Hackers’ choice.
At the end of the two days there were winners in all 5 categories. The Google’s Choice award went to “Entity Extraction for Order Matching”. Team “Project Clippy” was named both Hackers’ Choice and the winners of the Relentless Customer Focus category. See below for the results of the 5 categories:
- Relentless Customer Focus and Hackers’ Choice
- Winning Team: Project Clippy
- Hackers: Misha Balyasin, Alex Saad, Leo Smerling, and Gabriele Lanaro
- This project provided a gamified experience to make the process of leaving a product review even more seamless.
- Always Improving
- Winning Team: Customer Causal MetaLeaners
- Hackers: Colin Gray, Irene Wang, Huy Vo Tran, Wenhao Xu, and Santiago Velez Ferro
- Team Customer Causal MetaLeaners worked to build lightweight procedure(s) for computationally distributed, multi-target, customized loss functions to make causal meta-learners more applicable to real-world Wayfair problems.
- Google’s Choice Award:
- Winning Team: Entity Extraction for Order Matching
- Hackers: Roger Bock, Bradley West, Sina Moeini, and Jonathan de Melker Worms
- This team built out a solution to use text models to extract and identify the products that customers purchased from user reviews.
- People’s Choice:
- Winning Team: KNN and ANN on Vertex AI
- Hackers: Santosh Jhingade, Ashrith Marpaka, Nikhil Bhaip, Adam Schulze, and Brandon Sanders
- This team used Vertex AI to expand the impact they can have on suppliers and customers by providing accurate and real-time information of products that match either description or image.
Wayfair leaders reflected on the two days and shared their input. Matt Ferrari, Head of Ad Tech, Customer Intelligence, and Machine Learning; Engineering and Product at Wayfair said, “Wayfair has a lot of vendors, but very few strategic partners, and Google is that. Our Partner.” “Thank you all for the participation! I’m grateful to Google, and the many others for helping lead a successful event.”
Wayfair partners with Google Cloud to optimize performance and resiliency, support scaling data-driven decisions, and Increase employee productivity. “Our category is ripe for innovation, and our partnership with Google Cloud helps us ensure that great ideas can come from anywhere by empowering our technologists with cutting-edge products and solutions,” said Ferrari. “We’re proud to partner on efforts like hackathons that align with our team’s eagerness to work on complex, rewarding problems that push the envelope and challenge us to always think big.”
At first Google Cloud won Wayfair over with the speed, reliability and performance of their technology. Hackathons like this one exemplify that what is equally as important is Google Cloud’s willingness to work side-by-side with Wayfair at every level to enable a culture of innovation. Learn more about the Wayfair-Google Cloud partnership here.
Google Submits Two Large Language Model Benchmarks into the Open Division
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Recently, models with billions or trillions of parameters have shown significant advances in machine learning capabilities and accuracy. For example, Google’s LaMDA model is able to engage in a free-flowing conversation with users about a large variety of topics. There is enormous interest within the machine learning research and product communities in leveraging large models to deliver breakthrough capabilities. The high computational demand of these large models requires an increased focus on improving the efficiency of the model training process, and benchmarking is an important means to coalesce the ML systems community towards realizing higher efficiencies.
In the recently concluded MLPerf v1.1 Training round1, Google submitted two large language model benchmarks into the Open division, one with 480 billion parameters and a second with 200 billion parameters. These submissions make use of publicly available infrastructure, including Cloud TPU v4 Pod slices and the Lingvo open source modeling framework.
Traditionally, training models at these scales would require building a supercomputer at a cost of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars – something only a few companies can afford to do. Customers can achieve the same results using exaflop-scale Cloud TPU v4 Pods without incurring the costs of installing and maintaining an on-premise system.
Large model benchmarks
Google’s Open division submissions consist of a 480 billion parameter dense Transformer-based encoder-only benchmark using TensorFlow and a 200 billion-parameter JAX benchmark. These models are architecturally similar to MLPerf’s BERT model but with larger dimensions and number of layers. These submissions demonstrate large model scalability and high performance on TPUs across two distinct frameworks. Notably, these benchmarks, with their stacked transformer architecture, are fairly comparable in terms of their compute characteristics with other large language models.
Our two submissions were benchmarked on 2048-chip and 1024-chip TPU v4 Pod slices, respectively. We were able to achieve an end-to-end training time of ~55 hours for the 480B parameter model and ~40 hours for the 200B parameter model. Each of these runs achieved a computational efficiency of 63%- calculated as a fraction of floating point operations of the model together with compiler rematerialization over the peak FLOPs of the system used2.
Next-generation ML infrastructure for large Model training
Achieving these impressive results required a combination of several cutting edge technologies. First, each TPU v4 chip provides more than 2X the compute power of a TPU v3 chip – up to 275 peak TFLOPS. Second, 4,096 TPU v4 chips are networked together into a Cloud TPU v4 Pod by an ultra-fast interconnect that provides 10x the bandwidth per chip at scale compared to typical GPU-based large scale training systems. Large models are very communication intensive: local computation often depends on results from remote computation that are communicated across the network. TPU v4’s ultra-fast interconnect has an outsized impact on computational efficiency of large models by eliminating latency and congestion in the network.
The performance numbers demonstrated by our submission also rely on our XLA linear algebra compiler and leverage the Lingvo framework. XLA transparently performs a number of optimizations, including GSPMD based automatic parallelization of many of the computation graphs that form the building blocks of the ML model. XLA also allows for reduction in latency by overlapping communication with the computations. Our two submissions demonstrate the versatility and performance of our software stack across two frameworks, TensorFlow and JAX.
Large models in MLPerf
Google’s submissions represent an important class of models that have become increasingly important in ML research and production, but are currently not represented in MLPerf’s Closed division benchmark suite.
We believe that adding these models to the benchmark suite is an important next step and can inspire the ML systems community to focus on addressing the scalability challenges that large models present.
Our submissions demonstrate 63% computational efficiency, cutting edge in the industry. This high computational efficiency enables higher experimentation velocity through faster training. This directly translates into cost savings for Google’s Cloud TPU customers.
Please visit the Cloud TPU homepage and documentation to learn more about leveraging Cloud TPUs using TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX.
1. The MLPerf name and logo are trademarks of MLCommons Association in the United States and other countries. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. See www.mlcommons.org for more information.
2. Computational efficiency and end-to-end training time are not official MLPerf metrics
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