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A Story of Throwing the Baby Out With The Bathwater in Supply Chain Planning

Supply Chain Shaman

In 2004, I worked with a Midwest North American meatpacker to help define its supply chain strategy. Consumers constantly change the mix preferences in purchases. Somedays, the focus is on steaks or ribs and the next on the purchase of ground or cubed meat. What do I mean? To illustrate, let me share a story.

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Demand Planning. When The Answer To Two Simple Questions Is Not So Simple.

Supply Chain Shaman

The Center of Excellence at the company wanted to improve base-level capabilities but struggled to move forward due to the traditional views of the planning team, which they felt were self-serving. The team was not calibrated on the role of forecasting and the basics around process excellence. Models Matter.

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E2open Acquires Steelwedge. Impact on Market?

Supply Chain Shaman

Founded in 2000, Steelwedge was an innovator in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and was an early provider of cloud solutions for supply chain. I asked him over and over, “Is the market ready for a solution for JUST Sales and Operations Planning?” The supply chain management software market had soured.

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Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Supply Chain Shaman

Hau L Lee, Triple-A Supply Chains, Harvard Business Review, October 2004. Our current processes and dependencies on Excel spreadsheets cannot get us to our goal. E2open last week announced the purchase of Serus. The Kinaxis model is an enterprise solution. It is an enterprise solution, not a network solution.

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Untangling The Tangled Web We Weave

Supply Chain Shaman

The year was 2004. Was it that Kraft was not clear in its definition of supply chain excellence (which was true) or not clear on how to best use the system (which was also true)? The software never expanded in scope to manage multi-tier inventories. What defines supply chain excellence? The reason? Is the plan feasible?

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2016: The Start of the Third Act?

Supply Chain Shaman

One of the barriers to greater progress in driving supply chain excellence is the current state of user satisfaction with current technologies. With the evolution of Software as a Service (SAAS) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) technologies there are now more options. Every supply chain organization is slightly different.

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Visibility: If Only I Could See

Supply Chain Shaman

As a result, when I was a Gartner analyst and technology providers would provoke me to write a Magic Quadrant on visibility solutions, I would laugh. In 2004-2006, Greg Aimi (now a Gartner analyst) and I worked on a common definition of visibility for over a year. These solutions are proprietary and closed.