Recently, I visited our office in Antwerp, Belgium. I was there to participate in the LogiChem conference with William (Billy) Duty, the Director of S&OP Center of Excellence at Momentive and an Arkieva client. As is often the case with my trips to Belgium, I ended up drinking more beer in my very short stay
What-if scenario planning is an excellent technique that allows a planner to ask questions on the future. Given a working model that represents a business, a planner can quickly ask the questions that represent the range of possibilities in the foreseeable future which can render the current plan obsolete.
In one of my previous blog posts on inventory, I used the info-graphic above to show the evolution of software to calculate safety stock. Since then, I have been asked the following question by several supply chain colleagues: How should one decide if their business needs Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO)? This is my attempt at
It was Sir Isaac Newton who told us that things not in motion will continue to be that way until acted upon by an external force. Vice versa, things that were already in motion will continue to move that particular way without a change in direction or speed unless acted upon by an external force.
My first memory of inventory is from a conversation I had with my Dad when I was probably 10 years old. I remember him telling me to go to a particular store because the owner kept a lot of inventory on hand. He equated that to the owner being a wealthy man, who obviously knew
Key Points: Work hard on finding the ‘perfect’ metric that measures the behavior you are trying to improve. Look for both the cause and the effect. In the absence of such a metric, do not ignore the ones that are only partially good. Do not measure something just because the data is available.
Sales is a fast-paced business; people who aren’t focused on the here and now usually lose out on sales. As mentioned in Jelle’s blog, sales persons would rather be out in the field selling, which is the reason why they feel it would be a waste of their resources sitting in their office forecasting. Yet,
Recently, someone forwarded a Live Science web link to me. The web page had information on how human brains are able to read words and make sense of them even when the letters are jumbled up. The website suggested that it was possible for a human brain to make sense of the words as long
Last post, I talked about the different mindsets as one goes through the planning, scheduling and execution of a family’s vacation to Florida. My attempt was to try and highlight the differences between the three stages. In this post, I will try and pull those concepts into supply chain planning.
In the supply chain world, we often talk about planning, scheduling and execution. In this two part blog post, we will try and explain this from two points of view: One from real life and another from a supply chain perspective.