Most businesses would put high customer service as one of their top business priorities. While there are many different things that make up the overall customer experience, one of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that companies measure is the timely delivery of goods to the customer. In safety stock calculations, this is typically an input
Humans love stories and learn best from examples. Behavior scientists have even given a name to this common practice: Narrative Bias. In simple terms, the human brains understands and retains facts much better if there is a story binding them together. This concept has been talked about by many authors in many different contexts and
I recently watched a TED talk video by Alison Ledgerwood on YouTube. In the video, Alison gives the example of her paper getting accepted for publication (positive news) and another one getting rejected for publication (negative news). She talks about how it takes longer to recover from (i.e., go back to being her normal self) a
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is typically a monthly process. Through a series of detailed planning steps, and usually three meetings, companies define a plan to deal with what they think they can do to meet the demand given their supply and other constraints.
Key Point: A Sales and Operation Planning (S&OP) meeting is a meeting to design the future course of a business. Yet, too many companies spend too much time talking about the past or the current period. I recommend using about 60-70% of the time discussing the future. The (S&OP) process consists of a lot of
Key Point: Coefficient of Variation is not a perfect measure of forecastability. However, if used properly, it can add value to a business’s forecasting process. In the world of forecasting, one of the key questions to consider is the forecastability of a particular set of data. For example, a salesman might consistently be better at
You have a favorite forecast accuracy metric(s) you’ve been practicing within the organization for a while, and now you think you are ready to bring it to the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) meeting as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of your demand planning process. But you are not sure exactly how to go about
I saw this news article on CNN (here) about our planet’s earth bigger, older cousin. Quite an interesting discovery if you ask me. However, it got me thinking about the family tree of Mean Absolute Forecast Error (MAPE), a subject that I am a little bit familiar with. A few weeks ago, I wrote about
I spent some time discussing MAPE and WMAPE in prior posts. In this post, I will discuss Forecast BIAS. Forecast BIAS can be loosely described as a tendency to either Forecast BIAS is described as a tendency to either over-forecast (meaning, more often than not, the forecast is more than the actual), or under-forecast (meaning, more often
A few weeks ago, I talked about the Supply Chain of Belgian Beer (click here to read that) and shared some trivia. Some folks suggested a follow up on frites or french fries. I will share a few more interesting things I learned about Belgium during my trips there. And just to be upfront, unlike