Does their cost/benefit analysis incorporate the cost of paying data scientists to build these models?
I'm really confused as to how the weight of a SKU is not information that's readily available to them from the manufacturer, or why a missing weight can't be determined as part of the fulfillment process. After all, you only need to weigh a SKU once, so it's only a problem the first time that item is packed. You'd think knowing the weights of products in your warehouse would be a solved problem by 3PLs and not one requiring the services of people with graduate degrees in statistics.
Clothes and shoes have a high turnover (fashion) and multiple variants per SKU. I can see a manufacturer not providing perfect or accurate weights for every shoe size for every style.
we used our own C++ multi-threaded Gibbs sampler, which turned out to mix fast enough for the estimation - even given the large number of parcels/items we have at Zalando
I'm really confused as to how the weight of a SKU is not information that's readily available to them from the manufacturer, or why a missing weight can't be determined as part of the fulfillment process. After all, you only need to weigh a SKU once, so it's only a problem the first time that item is packed. You'd think knowing the weights of products in your warehouse would be a solved problem by 3PLs and not one requiring the services of people with graduate degrees in statistics.