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Archive for the year 2007

Canals cut emissions – and congestion – for Tesco

November 12th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

While working on a European distribution strategy assignment for a client earlier this year, I did some work on how to use lower-carbon multi-modal transport and still get goods to the customer on time. So I was interested to read about Tesco’s latest innovation – bringing imported wine down Manchester Ship Canal by barge. My […]

More numeracy woes, bad news for supply chain skills

November 7th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept […]

Lean? Or Continuous Improvement?

October 31st, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

Sometimes people get hung up on semantics. Sometimes it pays to be clear – very clear. I am currently trying to wade through some waters muddied by misunderstanding and poor use of terminology. My employer has had some good quality experience of Lean (albeit in a fairly small section of its operations) for about four […]

Do we have the numeracy for Six Sigma?

October 23rd, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

There was a pretty depressing story in the Guardian a few days ago that proposes, in typical newspaper hyperbole, that Britain is in the grip of a numeracy crisis. For once, the concern is justified. According to the article, there are 3 times as many UK adults with poor numeracy than poor literacy. That’s 15.1 […]

What level of availability should my warehouse give?

September 13th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

This is a question that arises with frightening regularity. Although we generally want both availability and stock turn to continue improving over the long term (and there are various methods of achieving that), nonetheless there are some theoretical limits to those numbers, together with a requirement to decide the availability target for right now. Let’s […]

Inspiration from the strangest places: Bukowski and Six Sigma

September 11th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

You wouldn’t expect a great lesson in Six Sigma from an alcoholic Beat novelist, would you…? This is from Charles Bukowski‘s first novel, Post Office, which is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s “career” with the US Postal Service, delivering and sorting mail. I’ve mainly paraphrased the episode in order to respect the author’s copyright. […]

10 ways to reduce inventory and improve service – part 2

August 30th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

This is the second part of a two-part post. Part 1 was posted last week. 6. Optimise stock over the range The same investment in stock can produce better or worse levels of availability. This is intuitively obvious if we think of some reductio ad absurdum examples: all of our stock invested in a single […]

10 ways to reduce inventory and improve service – part 1

August 23rd, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

This was prompted by a question on the CILT’s eDiscussion forum. I thought the topic deserved a little more room for explanation, so here are my top ten tactics for simultaneous inventory reduction and service improvement. I have divided this into two posts – five tactics today, the next five coming up in part 2. […]

Overstock in pure Pull supply chains

August 17th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

I have had a couple of conversations recently that have led me to think about how much overstock we might expect in a Pull supply chain even under fairly idealistic conditions. The first was with a colleague working on a redesign of a warehouse in which a large number of products had stock outside of […]

Storage capacity calculator – try it out

August 14th, 2007 | By: Martin Arrand

I have added a permanent page containing a storage capacity calculator that I have put together. This little widget is based on something I knocked up years ago to aid warehouse planning and design. Please follow the link under the site banner or click here for the storage capacity calculator.