Archive for Supply Chain Planning
The Unbiased Forecast
· CommentsI’ve been interviewing supply chain executives at consumer goods manufacturers to learn how they are using downstream data. A key focus area for these executives is using this data to improve the accuracy of their demand forecasts.
A couple of the executives I interviewed raised an interesting point about forecasting that I don’t remember coming across before: the importance of having an unbiased forecast. Forecasts, by their very nature… Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I had a face-to-face conversation with an executive from a consumer electronics accessories manufacturer. Since January 2007 this company has implemented five Oracle supply chain solutions: Demantra Demand Management, Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP), Global Order Promising, Oracle Inventory Optimization (IO), and the Oracle iSupplier Portal (note: Oracle is an ARC client). Considering the size of this company and the scope of its implementation… Continue reading
Angélique Moon, Director of Product Management for Consumer Goods at Oracle, briefed me recently on Oracle’s Demand Signal Repository (DSR) solution. At the end of the presentation, Ms. Moon and I bemoaned the fact that the vocabulary used to describe these types of products is not very good. Shortly after, I had a similar conversation with Razat Guarav, the SVP of Sales at i2 Technologies (both Oracle and… Continue reading
Achieving robust forecasts is very difficult, if not impossible, in some industries. This is particularly true for companies in the semiconductor industry, which is very volatile because of its speed of innovation. Moore’s Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years (equivalent to about 30 percent… Continue reading
“Oil is becoming increasingly difficult and costly to recover, and the problem of managing the supply chain and profits has become more complex than ever. After weathering the economic downturn, the industry must boost capacity for future demand, and keep a close eye on the economics of oil and gas production.”
So wrote my colleague Allen Avery, in a recent ARC Insight report titled “In an Uncertain
Supply-Demand Mismatch at 37,000 Feet
· CommentsMy wife’s grandfather Irving was in the habit of offering guests food he didn’t have.
“Are you hungry,” he would ask, “want a piece of fruit, an apple, an orange, a banana?” Even if I wasn’t hungry, I would always accept his offer. “Sure, I’ll have a banana, thank you.”
Irving would look at me for a second or two, as if lost in thought, and then he… Continue reading
The Bullwhip Effect is a 50 year old problem first described by Jay Forrester at MIT in 1958. Forrester demonstrated it could take up to 6 months for a 10 percent increase in store demand to cascade across the extended retail supply chain and it could result in as much as a 40 percent increase in demand on the factory.
Fast forward to today. Suffice it to say that industry initiatives… Continue reading
A Missed Opportunity: Linking Demand with Transportation Planning and Execution
Posted on Mar 02 2010 | By Greg Brady · Comments (0)Supply chain best practices preach the benefits of end-to-end, integrated business processes. We regularly hear analysts and industry experts tell companies, “Your supply chain is fragmented and you must connect it.” And while some traditionally silo-based groups are doing better at sharing information and connecting their supply chain, most organizations are not planning and executing across functional domains to create a truly interconnected and collaborative supply chain.
Demand planning… Continue reading