In September I began, in February I reflected on, and this week I completed ARC’s Supply Chain Planning Global Market Research Study. I’m going to take this opportunity to summarize some of the study’s key findings. Supply Chain Complexity Meets Planning Intricacy Global supply chains continue to be increasingly complex. This is not only due to outsourcing and an ever extending supply chain, but also due to competitive forces such as shorter product lifecycles and […]
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Archive for S&OP
In September 2015 I began the update of ARC Advisory Group’s global supply chain planning (SCP) market study. In a Logistics Viewpoints article published at that time, I discussed some of the major changes in SCP over the previous decade. I am now concluding this SCP market study update. I have spoken with the vast majority of large SCP software suppliers within the market, discussed their companies’ SCP product roadmaps, learned about the evolving requirements […]
Read More →At this point, experts are not saying that China has slipped into recession. But recessions are defined in the rear-view mirror, after they have already occurred. Further clouding the issue is the fact that leading economists have long questioned how accurate China’s GDP data really is. Companies would be well advised to start doing contingency planning assuming that China is in recession. Further, companies need to also ask not just how a Chinese recession impacts […]
Read More →A week and a half ago I attended and spoke at the North American 3PL Summit and Chief Supply Chain Officer Forum in Chicago. Procter & Gamble’s Julio Nemeth, SVP of Product Supply, also spoke. He spoke about P&G’s supply chain initiatives. He had some interesting things to say: They are now using demand sensing data in fairly sophisticated ways, such as the inclusion of customer web search data. However their forecast accuracy at the SKU […]
Read More →Last week on Talking Logistics, I had a very thought-provoking conversation with Tony Martins, VP of Strategic Services at Halo Pharmaceutical. Tony is a unique supply chain executive — he not only sees the potential value of social networking in transforming supply chain processes, he’s also a thought leader and visionary in this area, publishing his ideas and models on his blog, Cyber Supply Chain. Tony speaks from experience. In his previous role as VP of […]
Read More →Last week, I attended JDA’s user conference, JDA FOCUS 2013. There were more than 2,600 attendees there — a bigger event than last year because of the JDA/RedPrairie acquisition. One of the things I value about this conference is not only the opportunity to listen to smart customers talk, but also having conversations with some of JDA’s sharp executives who test my thinking. Here were some interesting tidbits: A top executive from Walmart gave a […]
Read More →Earlier this month I attended the SAPinsider meeting in Las Vegas. SAP was actively promoting its HANA solutions, which uses in-process memory primarily for providing real-time analytics. HANA is particularly well suited to analyzing extremely large amounts of data very quickly. SAP says that HANA can analyze data hundreds of times faster than traditional approaches to business intelligence. The keynote address was given by Steve Lucus, the EVP and General Manager for SAP Database and […]
Read More →It is common to speak of a “one number” demand forecast. And a “one number” forecast works fine if your demand forecast and your manufacturing planning are based on the same time period. For example, if you do a monthly forecast and the plant uses it to plan production for the entire month, then there is no inconsistency. But a lot can happen in a month. I was briefed a while back by Nitin Goyal, […]
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Supply Chain Brief
Guest Commentary: Supply Chain Innovation: The Road to a Real-time Supply Chain is Now Wide Open
A new Bloomberg BusinessWeek Research Services survey and report makes it clear that innovative supply chain tools are widely acknowledged to be crucial to meeting corporate goals now and in the future as supply chains grow more complex, customers become more demanding and globalization accelerates. In this context, supply chain innovation is becoming more important as companies that have invested in traditional tools are now determined to operate real-time supply chains. Although more than three-quarters […]
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