Supply Chain View

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A couple of weeks ago I was writing about the cultural aspects of Lean. Then a glut of work hit me and a lot of stuff had to give: work-life balance, Supply Chain View, … This happens occasionally due to the demands of consulting project work, but it has made me sensitive of late to […]

At a seminar I ran earlier this week for CILT, this is a paraphrasing of what one of the delegates said to me: “Lean is all about cost reduction. It focuses on the internal processes of the company. It does not think about the customer.” It is now over 60 years since Toyoda Kiichiro, then […]

I lent a hand yesterday at a workshop run with a client to aid configuration of an upgrade to their ERP system. The workshop, which focussed on DRP (Distribution Resource Planning) and Deployment (how we turn DRP plans into purchase orders and stock transfers), threw up the following problem. Manufacturer to Packer to Distribution Centre […]

In my report of the CILT HELP Forum I mentioned in passing the Certificate in Humanitarian Logistics. Yesterday the latest edition of CILTWorld dropped through my letterbox and I was delighted to see a 2-page spread on the qualification. Charles Muchiri – Head of Warehousing for the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross and […]

I have just read a paper published in the Jan 07 edition of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) entitled “A new approach of forecasting intermittent demand for spare parts inventories in the process industries”. The authors – ZS Hua, B Zhang, J Yang and DS Tang from the University of Science and […]

In December 2006 I presented seminar for the CILT on Supply Chain Inventory Management, and this very simple demonstration comes from that presentation. It is designed to highlight the different levels of forecast accuracy that we can achieve for slow and fast SKUs. (As I mentioned in my post from 29 Nov 06, estimating forecast […]

Let’s face it, we never think our forecasts are accurate enough. We suspect there must be a better way out there. Often this is down to the simple fact that forecasting is never precise. How can it be? I often think that one of the most important eureka moments for a supply chain professional is […]