An earlier Sudoku blog recognizing Puzzle Day, provided an overview of solving Sudoku using MILP optimization and mentions these methods are helpful to find solutions in supply or central planning. This blog elaborates on “binary variables” which is the connecting technology between Sudoku and Supply Chain Management (SCM).
With the holiday season, everyone is making their wish list and checking it twice. Here are some ideas to add to any director of supply chain's wish list.
For a new technology to be successful it requires the correct seasoning which requires time in the trenches. This blog captures lessons from two past gurus.
Today we will discuss a few of the logistics challenges from the perspective of an industry expert with lots of time in the trenches. Arkieva is ready to help Delaware.
In this blog post, we will briefly review some examples of being “COVID-19 adrift” with just data and then focus on the primary task – demonstrating how modeling can be used to understand the impact of group size on COVID-19 spread.
Monte Carlo Discrete Event Computer Simulation is a particularly powerful and flexible “tool of the trade” for a wide range of challenges in supply chain and operations management. This blog provides some basics on MCDECS, the next blog will use MCDECS to explain why limiting the size of a gathering helps reduce the spread of COVID-19.
Having a vision of the future is important to help coordinate SCM initiatives towards the “global good” – but having a vision is worthless without effective work in the trenches. In fact, a far better vision is “sense and respond” SAR which moves an organization from a big bang paradigm periodic driven approach that currently dominates SCM even in best in class organizations to an “as needed” basis.
Before the current set of analytics and SCM experts, it was the OR/MS profession that drove the development and successful application of analytic and data methods to improve supply chain performance. INFORMS continues to lead in the ongoing challenge of more intelligent and responsive supply chains. In this blog, we will point out some keynote addresses from the current meeting of relevance to successful SCM technology investments.
“Chaos, complexity, and uncertainty” often victimize an organization’s supply chain outstripping the ability of spreadsheet-based tools to respond intelligently. Sounds like 2020? In fact, this comes from one of the original Jedi Knights Dr. Harlan Crowder in a 1997 paper titled “Helpful Hints for OR/MS Consultants”. The purpose of this blog is to revisit this paper since the hints for success are as relevant now as they were then.
The purpose of a vision in this journey is to create a focus on the implementation of decision technology as tools to overcome inherent organizational cognitive limitations of bounded rationality and uncertainty bias to improve SCM. This blog provides some critical lessons to protect a firm’s investment in technology.