Dell has a complex supply chain. And, this complexity has, over time, had a corrosive effect on Dell’s order fulfillment performance. In Dell’s case, when they dug into this by talking to customers, what they heard over and over was “I want you to build, ship, and deliver what I ordered, when you said you would.”
Hostess went bankrupt. But Hostess products are back in stores. This happened after the brands and certain factories were purchased out of bankruptcy in April of 2013. The brand was then relaunched in July of 2013. That left just a few months to build a unique, new supply chain from scratch.
IoT projects often become Big Data projects. Distributing more intelligence down to the device level could help prevent database bloat and streamline the corporate application environment. But these decisions are not clear cut. There are pros and cons associated with either distributing or centralizing both IoT intelligence and data.
Top supply chain officers across the industry were recently surveyed¹ on their biggest barriers to effective inventory management. Their top two responses were “Can’t Optimize Network Holistically” and “Demand Volatility”. It’s no wonder: often inventory placement decisions are made in a vacuum without considering the end-to-end supply chain impact. In addition, product demand has become […]
I chose “Revisiting Supply Chain Planning” as the title for this blog post because I believe the phrase captures both the current focus of my research agenda (what I am doing) and the heightened priority SCP has taken on the agenda of many supply chain executives (what practitioners are doing). Earlier this week, I began […]
Supply chain processes have existed since Eve brought the forbidden apple to Adam, even though the term supply chain is a relatively recent one. Over the millennia since, supply chains have evolved at an ever-greater pace. During the long evolution of the supply chain there have been certain inflection points where significant change happens fairly […]
There is more than one way to skin a cat. And the fat cat at ProMat is the high-volume of small, multi-line item orders being fulfilled by today’s distribution operations. ProMat 2015 has 808 exhibitors (and 35,000 attendees), so It’s difficult to boil down such a large and diverse set of offerings to one concept, […]