Are you building your company to be Lean or are you building it to be Agile? Cause building your company to be BOTH Lean and Agile, will only mean that you are NEITHER! Ask yourself the below 4 questions.If you really want to be good in answering Questions 1 & Read more…
“No one in the supply chain has sold till the time the end customer has bought.” This seemingly simple diktat is hard to put in practise, after all, why do I care if my customer’s customer is buying my stuff or not. Err.. Turns out that you should! In one Read more…
Sherman’s Law of Forecast Accuracy: “Forecast Accuracy improves in direct correlation to its distance from usefulness.” The statistical forecast is only useful when determining a basis for segmentation, analyzing patterns and creating baseline forecasts. As a result, statistical forecasts about stock keeping units (SKUs) at the location level, for example, Read more…
Should supply chains be built for Efficiency or for Responsiveness? Leanness / Efficiency is currently the leading approach to supply chain management. The main principle of lean supply chains is elimination of any part of the system that does not bring value (it is wasting)– costly inventory, excessive capacities, duplicate Read more…
There are four basic types of supply chain drivers: constraints, variability, velocity, and life cycle. The best teams design their supply chains based on these factors. There are five basic types of constraints: material, manufacturing, transportation, financially imposed, or regulatory constraints. The bottlenecks shift depending on volume and mix. Skilled Read more…
Companies aiming for change concentrate on “task alignment” – reorganizing employee roles, responsibilities, and relationships to solve specific business problems. Task alignment is easiest in small units – a plant, department, or business unit- where goals and tasks are clearly defined. Thus, the chief problem with corporate change is how Read more…
Demand uncertainty and supply rigidity often create inventory shortages. The immediate consequence of inventory shortages might be significant lost sales and revenue ; however, the impact of stockouts cannot be fully evaluated without understanding how inventory shortages influence long-term customer behaviour. In practice, the most common tactic for preventing stock outs Read more…
One of the keys to achieving agile response to fast-changing markets lies upstream of the organisation in the quality of supplier relationships.Many companies have not recognised that competitive advantage that can be derived from closer relationships with key suppliers. Instead there is often an arms- length, even adversarial approach to Read more…
There are actually 2 decoupling points in any supply chain 1. ‘Material’ decoupling point: Strategic inventory is held in as generic a form as possible. This point ideally should lie as far downstream in the supply chain and as close to the final market place as possible. 2. ‘Information’ decoupling Read more…
“Lean thinking” embraces the elimination of waste in its various forms. Activities that consume resources but generate no redeeming value in the eyes of customers are wastes that must be eliminated in the “lean” paradigm. Agility, on the other hand, emphasizes flexible, timely action in response to rapidly changing demand environments. Though Read more…