Supply Chain View

This is basic stuff, but as usual there is a lack of clear and concise explanations of this on the web. It is also very important, as most methods of inventory control can be reexpressed as some form of reorder point method. Hence this simple introduction. I have also prepared a Reference Sheet that summarises […]

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 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. […]

I was interested to find an article in this month’s Logistics & Transport Focus headed “No more lean times: why inventory is not waste and warehouses add value”. The author, Steve Sordy, has chosen a title that is a kind of teasing of the more dogmatic of lean devotees – British culture has little patience […]

My recent vacation in Morocco has inspired this post about the requirements for holding inventory in the retail supply chain. As I strolled around the souks – the traditional markets and shopping districts of North Africa and the Middle East – I reflected on the sheer quantity of stuff in the shops. Whether it was […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Supply Chain View has not been running for long, but we are already creating a library of supply chain discussion and resources. If you have just found us, here are the top articles so far: Lean Lean and inventory misconceptions Forecasting Best forecasting method for your supply chain? Forecasting intermittent demand for spare parts – […]

With the help of some colleagues I have compiled a list of recommended books for those interested in all things Supply Chain. I will be adding to these as time goes by, and I will link in any reviews. I realise even as I type this that there are a lot more books on my […]