Managing the Complex Network is Key to Profitable Growth
Dr. Ken Fordyce shares his takeaways from Gartner's free webinar on the performance lenses that supply chain leaders must apply and balance.
The Wrong Inventory Approach Can Strangle Production Output
Successful management of inventory is a hot topic in supply chain management. While it's easy to measure, the cause may be complicated to uncover.
Tools of the Trade: National Puzzle Day, Probability and the Board Game Risk
National Puzzle Day is January 29th. It is a day Arkieva celebrates because the ongoing challenge of smarter supply chain decisions involves supersized puzzles and games. This year we will focus on probabilistic forecasting using the board game Risk. This blog will show how Monte Carlo Simulation can be used to estimate the average number of “wins”, but critically the range of possible “wins” across some interval.
Tools of the Trade: Characteristics of Agents of Change Teams to Drive Successful Investment
In previous “tools of the trade” blogs, the focus has been on conveying a basic understanding of core technologies critical to improving supply chain management decision making. Other blogs have focused on investing in technology. As with any investment there are risks to success. This blog focuses on the need for a small group driving technology that upsets the social order called agents of change (AOC).
How “Forecastable” is Your Data? It’s Complex Anyway You Look at It
These “key tools” balance a need for simple with a need to handle the complexity of SCM – following the IBM adage – complexity exists whether you ignore it or not, best not to ignore it.
RCCP Versus MPS: How Are They Connected? Elixirs and the Wrong Question
A reasonable question supply chain folks often ask themselves is ‘What is the relationship between Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) and Master Production Scheduling (MPS)?’ However, this is the wrong question to ask oneself. This blog will address the transition from AS to central planning as best practices and demonstrate that with a firm’s due diligence they can make the transition successfully. This is critical for what-ifs and effective use of optimization.
Data Science Tools of the Trade: Rolling Rounding to Handle Those Pesky Decimals
In many areas of supply chain management, analytic methods generate estimates with “pesky decimals”. The traditional method to eliminate the decimals is rounding. In this blog, we demonstrate the importance of this method and how to calculate these improved integer estimates.
Two Penny Model and COVID-19 Breakthrough Cases – Avoiding Data Driven Disaster
Learn how a simple binomial model can help anticipate the future including COVID-19 breakthrough cases just as models help a firm estimate it's future.
Classical Supply Chain Management Confronts its Quantum Revolution – the Path to Rapid Intelligent Response (RIR)
COVID-19 direct and ancillary events have made clear that uncertainty is an inherent part of the demand-supply network structure. Every firm, on a regular basis, faces “risk situations" such as manufacturing excursion, unexpected new demand or loss of demand, component supplier interruption, etc. This has placed risk management and rapid intelligent response (RIR) front and center in SCM discussions.
Five Steps to Develop an Effective S&OP Process – Step 4: Balance Supply and Demand
Over the past 5 weeks, Jeff Ondria has hosted a set of short interviews on LinkedIn about the five distinct steps to develop an effective S&OP process. In today's blog, we discuss step 4 Balancing Supply & Demand where we will answer some key questions with respect to balancing supply and demand.