We used to visit my grandfather's house for every other vacation. On the way there, we'd pass a refinery, and the flare fascinated me — every time we passed, day or night, it was alight. That one burning question stayed in my head for years: how does something that never stops actually keep going? The question didn't get answered until my undergraduate internship at a refinery, by which time it had already expanded. Now I wanted to know how a factory turns raw material into a shipped product, end to end. I trained as an Industrial Engineer because I wanted to understand the machina.

Nine years into my career, two things have shaped how I see operations. The first is that the best operations look simple on the surface and hide rigorous math underneath — the more elegant the flow, the more engineering lives below it. The second is that there is always a leaner version of the process you're looking at. What Masaaki Imai called kaizen — the discipline that not a day should pass without some improvement somewhere — is, to me, the whole job.

When LLMs became useful tools, I saw immediately what most people missed. They weren't a replacement for thinking; they were an accelerator for the kind of systems thinking I'd been doing for years. Suddenly I could formulate, code, and validate an MILP in a week instead of a month. Lean Six Sigma projects I would have scoped over a quarter, I could identify and pilot in weeks. It genuinely felt like a superpower — and more importantly, it felt like the right tool in the right hands.

That's me — Shashank — and this site is about the operator who brings academic rigor, coding depth, and Lean Six Sigma discipline to problems that live on actual warehouse floors, with AI velocity under the hood. My aspiration is to earn industry-fellow standing in societies like INFORMS and to shape the supply chain, logistics, and warehousing industry through publications, patents, and deployed work. The refinery flare was my first question. The work is the ongoing answer.