Supply Chain View

I enjoy making useful things freely available on Supply Chain View, so it’s good to find other people doing the same thing. There are 57 useful business statistics Excel files to download from the McGraw Hill website (to accompany the book Complete Business Statistics by Aczel and Sounderpandian). Among others, there are calculations for testing […]

(with apologies to Peter Norvig) Some time ago, the wise and well-respected computer scientist Peter Norvig wrote an article called “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”. I read it recently and found it so full of good sense I couldn’t resist taking the spirit of Norvig’s thoughts and applying them to supply chain management. Norvig’s […]

Here is something very useful for humanitarian logisticians: the Logistics Operations Guide, or LOG for short, brought to you by the Logistics Cluster. But not only is it useful for those in the humanitarian sector, it is an excellent model for the clear communication of logistics know-how: succint, practical and well-referenced. Click here to go […]

Mike Whiting has written an excellent article on the emergency response to January’s Haiti earthquake in the April 2010 edition of Logistics and Transport Focus. My copy of Focus often languishes in the in-tray for a couple of weeks before I even get the plastic wrap off, but I’d urge all CILT members to read […]

It’s a classic technique: follow an order from receipt to fulfilment. Shapiro, Rangan and Sviokla wrote an influential article on the subject in HBR in 1992 (Staple yourself to an order). Now, with more humour, a YouTube version. An outfit called Business Process Excellence in the US have posted an 8 minute animation on the […]

The CILT‘s Humanitarian and Emergencies Logistics Professionals (HELP) Forum met again on Tuesday last week (28 Oct 2008). It was another interesting session, so I thought I would post a brief report (with a long title). My apologies if I have mangled any of the following in transcribing my notes. For those that don’t know, […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is a simple storage capacity calculator, similar to something I put together a few years ago for warehouse design projects. It takes a set of product dimensions, a list of possible storage modules (pallets, stillages, bins, shelves, etc.) of different sizes, and calculates the number of products that will fit in each module. Providing […]

UPDATE 20/03/08: Since I wrote this post, Hopp has published a print version of the book with McGraw-Hill and moved from Northwestern to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. As a result, the download that was available free from the Northwestern website is no longer available. Apologies to anyone who has […]