What are the traps of managing supply chain inventories ? Manufacturers have been concentrating on quality of incoming materials and outgoing products, but they haven’t been paying as much attention to the costs associated with transporting and storing them. Some pointers from Lee & Billington are more valid today than Read more…
Last year companies were grappling with higher e-commerce order volumes, an uncertain global tariff environment, a tough political environment and stiff competition for both labour and warehousing space. Immediate reactions included reshoring manufacturing operations, seeking out new, non-Chinese sources of supply, transforming physical stores into full-blown delivery hubs and investing Read more…
The most readily identifiable component of inventory-driven costs is the traditional inventory cost item, usually defined as the “holding cost of inventory,” which covers both the capital cost of money tied up in inventory and the physical costs of having inventory (warehouse space costs, storage taxes, insurance, rework, breakage, spoilage). Read more…
As the supply chain management field has broadened and shifted over time, and as the term has been coopted and redefined by various interests, many views of supply-chain management have emerged. Some are detailed and operational; many focus on information technology. Executives are often uncertain about what falls within the Read more…
Today, many consumer goods companies have been forced to accommodate smaller markets, as these niches often provide the only path to growth and escape from heavy price competition. However newly launched products suffer from notoriously high failure rates! Surprisingly new products fail not because of technical shortcomings but because they Read more…
Research showing that while people may be quite aware that rare events can occur, and may even be able to imagine several examples, they consistently underestimate the probability of at least one such event (including the ones they didn’t imagine) occurring. In other words, we tend to underestimate the size Read more…
“When the company is not limited to a collocated workspace the idea of who can be part of the workforce expands.“ When we are faced with challenges, we sometimes come up with new ways of working. These new ways also give us excellent results. Problem is that when the challenge Read more…
Shortages of computer chips, medical gear and more have the US grappling for solutions. Post pandemic, even companies are wrestling new challenges. How do we ensure that we are effectively dealing with the post Covid challenges as a company or as a country? We need to necessarily look at 3 Read more…
How did retailers make customers believe they have better availability in a period when high amount of SKUs were unavailable? With the onset of pandemic in 2020, it was clear to retailers that shoppers didn’t really care about price. What they cared about was availability. Retailers noted that what started Read more…
Given the uncertainty and volatility in today’s world coupled with the complexity and ambiguousness of suppliers, the task of building world class supply chain is hard.Below are the capabilities companies need to build in order to get world class supply chain Clear end to end modeling understanding the capacity of Read more…