H3C is a leading global supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) products and solutions. As a provider covering the entire ICT market, H3C manages tens of thousands of spare parts related to after-sales services. With the company’s large number of SKUs, complex procurement processes, worldwide supply chain, multiple warehouses, and the diversity of customer SLAs, traditional manual inventory planning was leading to operational inefficiencies and insufficient forecast accuracy. These challenges can affect customer satisfaction and trust, overall profitability, and company brand value.

AI-Enhanced Demand Planning by OneClick.ai Drives Improved ForecastingIn 2019, H3C launched a demand forecasting project for spare parts to test current artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced analytical offerings. OneClick.ai predictive analytics can allow companies such as H3C to more accurately predict market demand, and in turn, improve operations management decision support workflows, including supply chain management, production planning, labor demands, and more. More effective demand forecasting assists in reducing excess stock while maintaining the same service level.

OneClick.ai, an AI software development company and Intel® AI Builder partner, offers a unique Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) platform and solutions for organizations like H3C that can benefit from predictive analytics for their supply chains. The OneClick.ai Augmented Forecasting platform allows customers to leverage all relevant data sources and automate relevant feature extractions and correlations from historical transactions, its contextual data and quickly produce more accurate forecasts without complex, labor- and time-intensive manual curated analytics. The platform supports and unifies all types of structured and unstructured data—text, numerical, and image—to identify key factors in common trends, enable simultaneous use of multiple data sets for higher dimensional analysis, and generate important company and customer insights.

H3C engaged with OneClick.ai to help address their global supply chain management challenges. Through a simple and intuitive interface, it merely took a few clicks by H3C engineers to build the customized forecasting models. Deploying those models as REST APIs makes it easy for add-on development and deep integration with their ERP system to serve forecasts at the SKU level on a daily basis, thereby enabling better planning, procurement and serviceability. H3C team is also leveraging OneClick.ai powerful AutoML engine and proprietary deep learning algorithms to train various models to serve other business applications.

Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor has the ability to process large datasets and perform complex

calculations at high speed. Its acceleration in AI computation can help to deliver more solid

projects driven by AI in the near future.

- Yuan Shen, Founder & CEO, OneClick

H3C Deploys OneClick AI to Improve Operational Efficiency and Forecasting Accuracy

AI Software as a ServiceAI Business Forecasting and Planning

OneClick.ai Augmented Forecasting Solution powered by Intel® architecture and Intel AI technologies improves H3C’s customer service level by 2% and reduces procurement costs by 13 percent1

Solution Brief

For more information about H3C, visit https://www.h3c.com/en/.

For more information about OneClick.ai, visit https://www.oneclick.ai/home/.

Learn more about the Intel AI Builders program at https://builders.intel.com/ai/membership.

Solution Brief | H3C Deploys OneClick AI to Improve Operational Efficiency and Forecasting Accuracy

Intel-Optimized Algorithms Enable Faster Training2

OneClick.ai solutions deliver a combination of automating multi-structured data unification, feature engineering and model training. OneClick.ai Demand Forecasting algorithms use the latest computing and deep learning approaches, including the following Intel HW and SW optimizations:

• Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)• Python language • TensorFlow framework• Parallelism and distributed computing

OneClick.ai applications described herein are optimized for performance on Intel Xeon® Scalable processors, leveraging the latest Intel-optimized version of TensorFlow, Python, and other AI tools and libraries. The company implemented several enhancements to their model training workloads, including:

• Architecting the software to reduce global memory access from threads on NUMA enabled systems

• Training models on Intel Xeon Scalable processors with enhanced technologies for deep learning

• Using Intel optimizations, such as the Intel Distribution for Python and Intel Optimizations for TensorFlow

• Using Intel Math Kernel Library-enabled (Intel MKL) NumPy, Scikit-Learn, and Pandas modules

These optimizations delivered 23% forecasting model training time reduction,2 which H3C benefited from and enabled business units to capture the market demand shift quicker than before.

ConclusionWith a global presence in the ICT market and offices across the Asia Pacific region, H3C supports millions of installations with service parts and supplies. This level of scale impacted their ability to manage and predict spare parts demand efficiently, thereby effecting their inventory, procurement, and service level. Powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors and leveraging key Intel AI technologies, OneClick.ai’s Augmented Forecasting platform helped H3C improve their customer service level by 2% and reduce procurement costs by 13%.1

1 Based on H3C testing. Intel does not control or audit third party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy.2 Refer to https://builders.intel.com/docs/aibuilders/oneclickai-uses-deep-learning-for-fast-accurate-demand-forecasting-and-sensing.pdf.

Testing conducted on Intel Xeon Platinum 8275CL (AWS c5.12xlarge Instance) processor, comparing ISV baseline performance vs. Intel recommended optimizations for TensorFlow training. Testing done by OneClick.ai.

OneClick.ai Forecast: GRU Cell RNN, Training Throughput Performance on Intel Xeon Platinum 8275CL Processor:

NEW (Intel Recommended Methods for MKL Parameter Tuning): Tested by OneClick.ai as of 11/27/2019. 1 socket Intel Xeon Platinum 8275CL Processor (AWS c5.12xlarge), 24 cores HT On Turbo ON Total Memory 96GB, BIOS: Amazon EC2 v1.0 (ucode:0x500002c), 16.04.6 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Deep Learning Framework: TensorFlow 1.13.1 MKL, OMP_NUM_THREADS=24, KMP_BLOCKTIME=1, KMP_AFFINITY=“verbose,granularity=fine,compact,1,0”, KMP_SET-TINGS=1, inter_op_parallelism_threads=2, intra_op_parallelism_threads=24, device_count = {‘CPU’: 24}, allow_soft_placement=True

BASELINE: Tested by OneClick.ai as of 11/27/2019. 1 socket Intel Xeon Platinum 8275CL Processor (AWS c5.12xlarge), 24 cores HT On Turbo ON Total Memory 96GB, BIOS: Amazon EC2 v1.0 (ucode:0x500002c), 16.04.6 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Deep Learning Framework: TensorFlow 1.13.1 MKL

Intel’s compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microproces-sors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors.

Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluat-ing your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more complete information visit: http://www.intel.com/performance

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H3C is a leading global supplier of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) products and solutions.