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.
Integrated Supply Chain Planning is the best way to be sure that you are running your business in a way that is best for your whole business. When you address your energy needs independent of your supply chain planning you can drive up costs unnecessarily and create rework. Industrial gas companies know this better than most because their production process is an extremely energy-intensive one. Keeping energy use to its minimum is a pinnacle of smart sustainable business practices.
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.
These interesting times that we are currently living through have thrown open a lot of challenges. Organizations and decision-makers must be agile and innovative to overcome the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown at us. In India, we had 2 lockdown periods in the last 15 months. Being a supply chain student, I try to watch and analyze day-to-day situations with a lot of interest and I see one area that needs improvement when lockdowns are implemented.
In a previous blog post, we discussed how a high or low value of Coefficient of Variation (CV) impacts the first or second term of safety stock. Today we decided to put this to the test using real customer data - here we will discuss our findings.
Taking the time to perform what-if analyses on a regular basis with real and speculative events, gives planners tremendous insight into what parts of the supply chain are most sensitive to changes. As a result, planners will have a sense of what is a big deal and what is not. And when a crisis happens, they’ll feel confident in their ability to respond.
Often inventory is considered the simplest component of supply chain management that can successfully be managed separately. The purpose of this blog is to provide some observations to avoid the runaway train. We will first review the basics of CPE and then address the use of target inventory (specifically ending finished goods inventory EFGI) in CPEs.
Learn how climate action relates to supply chain management. Achieving full-scale sustainability and circularity cannot happen without end-to-end alignment, hierarchical connectivity, integration of all parts of your supply chain, performance metrics, and business processes. And this alignment needs to be part of your existing supply chain before you can take it to the next level.
A reoccurring challenge in comparing and combining diverse time series in demand forecasting is the “scale” – as it is in combining metrics. Rescaling is a powerful but simple method to help with this issue enabling demand planners to focus on similarities of shape. This blog provides an example of one method called normalization.
Learn how to combine very different metrics/KPIs towards a composite score, this is a question that comes up quite often in my conversations with customers.