Archive for Supply Chain Planning
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
I recently wrote a posting about Walmart’s Project Impact initiative and how it enables beneficial synergies between merchandizing and the supply chain (see “Walmart’s ‘Win-Play-Show’ Assortment Strategy”). On the merchandizing side, Walmart is ending up with stores that are less cluttered and more customer friendly, and on the supply chain side, these stores are carrying fewer stock keeping units (SKUs).
The remodeled stores (the “Project Impact” stores) have… Continue reading
I recently received a newsletter from Lehigh University’s Center for Value Chain Research that showed the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) definition of “marketing” right next to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) definition of “supply chain management.” Here are their definitions:
AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers… Continue reading
Nestle Waters and Weather-Driven Demand
· CommentsEarlier this week, a colleague brought to my attention a company called Planalytics. Actually, at a supply chain conference several years ago, I attened a presentation by a manufacturer that was attempting to use Planalytics Business Weather Intelligence in their supply chain planning processes. At the time, weather-driven demand planning seemed interesting, but not ready for prime time. However, if you go to Planalytics’ website today, you’ll find several… Continue reading
I teach the supply chain management course at Northeastern University’s Executive MBA program, and this year I included a relatively new case study in the syllabus: “Crocs: Revolutionizing an Industry’s Supply Chain Model for Competitive Advantage by Michael Marks, et al. The case was published in June 2007, and it highlights how Crocs developed an “extremely flexible supply chain” that allows it to “adjust to changes in the… Continue reading
Professor Barry Keating of Notre Dame, coauthor of the leading college textbook on business forecasting (which actually has more buyers from businesses than from college students), was gracious enough to talk to me recently. The topic was using macroeconomic data to adjust forecasts down for coming recessions, or up when economies begin to grow again.
One of the points he made is that companies and forecasters in particular… Continue reading
I am doing some research on “Supply Chain Management in Times of Turbulence” and one of my premises is that firms with a robust strategic planning process are better equipped to deal with large, unexpected events, like the current global recession. What does a robust strategic planning process look like? How does strategic planning integrate with supply chain planning processes? In an attempt to answer these questions, I called my… Continue reading
Eliminating the Bullwhip Effect across the Extended Retail Supply Chain
Posted on Sep 01 2009 | By Andre Martin · Comments (0)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