Lenovo Research teamed with members of the factory operations group at Lenovo’s largest laptop manufacturing facility, LCFC, to replace a manual production scheduling system with a decision-making platform built on a deep reinforcement learning architecture. The system schedules production orders at all LCFC’s 43 assembly manufacturing lines, balancing the relative priorities of production volume, changeover cost, and order fulfillment. The multiobjective optimization scheduling problem is solved using a deep reinforcement learning model. The approach combines high computing efficiency with a novel masking mechanism that enforces operational constraints to ensure that the machine-learning model does not waste time exploring infeasible solutions. The use of the new model transformed the production management process enabling a 20% reduction in the backlog of production orders and a 23% improvement in the fulfillment rate. It also reduced the entire scheduling process from six hours to 30 minutes while it retained multiobjective flexibility to allow LCFC to adjust quickly to changing objectives. The work led to increased revenue of US $1.91 billion in 2019 and US $2.69 billion in 2020 for LCFC. The methodology can be applied to other scenarios in the industry.

No abstract

No abstract

Warehouse Club is a form of retail where goods are sold and stored in one space. General merchandise retailers offer a limited range of goods and fewer services at lower prices to end consumers and small businesses. The Warehouse Club is not new. It has been in the United States for nearly 50 years. Recently, the concept of "Warehouse Club" seems to become an essential vane of developing China's commercial supermarkets. Nevertheless, the Warehouse Club does not seem to be doing so well in China. This paper analyzes the development history of the American retail industry and studies the successful case of Costco in the Chinese market. After combining with the development of China's retail industry, it is concluded that copying the American Warehouse Club's business model will not have a future in the Chinese market and put forward a three-step new marketing plan.