This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
For the past decade, I have been studying these patterns. We purchase data from Y charts. (A Studying Performance of the Gartner Top 25 Award Winners Plotting corporate patterns against peer group performance through orbit charts enables a quick understanding of supply chain excellence. Consider Lenovo in Figure 1.
The award, based on beating the industry peer group on rate of improvement on the key metrics of growth, operating margin, inventory turns, and Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) while outperforming their peer group, is tough to achieve. Orbit Chart for L’Oréal at the Intersection of Inventory Turns and Operating Margin.
Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change. What Is Supply Chain Excellence? My second observation is that for 96% of public companies supply chain excellence is slip-sliding away. Reflections on Excellence. Tom Peters. Here, in this blog, I explain.
In my forty years of studying supply chain planning, the groups became larger, but with questionable results. We explore the concept of holistic inventory strategies focused on the form and function of inventory. 85% of inventory decisions are not managed in Advanced Planning Solutions. Lack of executive buy-in.
Rise in Inventories. Less Effective at Inventory Management. Inventories grew twenty days over the decade. Yes, companies held more inventory (measured in days of inventory) in 2019 than at the start of the 2007 recession. Sadly, most of it is the wrong inventory. Despite spending 1.1% Alignment Barriers.
Supply chain excellence is easier to say than to explain. After two decades of study, I think because it is a lack of understanding. At each company, there is a relationship between the metrics of growth, margin, inventory, customer service, and asset strategy. A Case Study. The reason? Discontinued in 2011.
Observations on What It Takes In the Mea Culpa post, I wrote that I used to believe that excellence in S&OP was a ratio of 60/30/10. (60% P&G did not appreciate the work Gilette accomplished on form and function of inventory and using market signals. One of my favorite case studies was Campbells in 2014.
This year supply chain leaders will celebrate thirty years of progress in supply chain management; but we have not made progress on one of the funamentals: inventory management. I think that it is time for us to take the litmus test and ask the hard questions, “Have our practices impacted days of inventory? I want to believe.
For the past five years, the team at Supply Chain Insights identified Supply Chains to Admire Award Winners by analyzing performance by peer group on the key metrics of growth, operating margin, inventory turns and Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). The total cost of ownership analyzes the total costs of the buying decision.
In fact, in our Supply Chains to Admire analysis, we find that this is true in twenty-five of twenty-eight industry sectors studied. Orbit Chart of Four Industry Sectors at the Intersection of Operating Margin and Inventory Turns (Year-over-Year Averages for the Sector). Only four percent of companies outperformed their peer groups.
In 2016, we finished a study on continuous improvement. In the study, when we asked for the top elements of business pain to drive continuous improvement for companies greater than 5B$ in annual revenue, as shown in Figure 1, we found the largest issues with cross-functional alignment and availability of talent. What Drives Value?
Consumers want to shop anywhere, and buy in the way that they want to buy. I have studied the building of collaborative processes and written about the shifts and highlighted where we are gaining value. Current State of Perpetual Inventory. Replenishment is fueled by an effective perpetual inventory signal.
Despite two decades of advancement in supply chain technologies, companies are struggling to gain balance at the intersection of operating margin, inventory turns and case fulfillment. Along the way, I will be doing more work on network design case studies. I would build an expertise system in the Supply Chain Center of Excellence.
When it comes to the management of inventory in value chains, frustration abounds. Executive, after executive, lament, “They have purchased many technologies and sponsored many projects to reduce inventories, but they are not seeing results.” Inventory is the culmination of many business decisions.
If S&OP efforts were that effective, don’t you think that we would have made more progress against inventory levels, margin, and growth? The issues are largely rooted in politics and the lack of clarity on supply chain excellence. Or planned orders to purchase orders?) And how do we measure it? (Is I don’t know.
However, what is clear from our recent study of 73 manufacturers using supply chain planning is that companies using best-of-breed solutions implement faster, achieve a quicker Return-on-Investment (ROI), and are more satisfied. However, this is not supported by the facts of a recent study. (At Study Results. Was it intentional?
We were discussing the results of the planning benchmarking work that we have just finished, and I was sharing some insights on inventory management when one of the panelists emphatically stated, “Inventory is a waste to manage. We feel so strongly about this that we do not have an inventory planning role.”
Supplier problems will cause a cascade of problems up and down the value stream, leading to supply order delays that cause inventory shortages, production disruptions, missed shipments and lost revenue. The study found that these leaders considered the largest gap to be between supply chain and procurement, citing it as a major issue.
Nick Lynch is the Global Excellence Manager at Shell Lubricants, a division of Shell Global. The Company implemented SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) including the standard functionality of Demand Planning (DP), Supply Network Planning (SNP), and Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS), yet many planners also used Excel.
As I shopped at Best Buy for office supplies, I struggled to not think about the massive disruption of electronics supply chain. I find three: organizational design, executive understanding of supply chain, and the lack of a clear definition of an optimization function for supply chain excellence. Clarity of Supply Chain Excellence.
As companies consider purchasing new solutions based on better planning engines—machine learning, rules-based ontological frameworks, narrow AI, pattern recognition, large language models, and sentiment analysis— I ask for the use of caution. However, SAP supply chain planning is an excellent system of record. You need both.
It was a story where people believed that functional excellence leads to supply chain superiority. I strongly feel that a blind focus on functional excellence will cause the supply chain to become out of balance. A Case Study. One that is going to eat you up! It is a low probability that this will ever happen.
Here is a link to the healthcare research study in the field. Pharmaceutical companies are struggling with falling margins and rising inventories. They each lag in their understanding of supply chain excellence, and are now struggling to build effective supply chain teams. It is rising inventory levels. What Can We Do?
My 67 quantitative studies over the past decade do not support the value. similarly, over 95% of manufacturers invested and implemented supply chain planning, but their primary tool today is Excel. This technique has been very useful for retail store inventory and MRO where demand is lumpy, latent, and difficult to forecast.
How do they buy from you? How do they buy from you?” Instead, in the SanDisk journey , they adjusted the speed of response to their customer segments, and actively designing inventory postponement strategies. The discussion of customer-segmented supply chains happens often. Why does it matter to you? It is systemic.
In a recent study, roughly 1/3 of respondents were familiar or very familiar with the concepts of the Graph Approach. Like Linus clinging to his blanket, supply chain teams make most of their decisions on Excel spreadsheets. Most current spending is focused on deploying traditional optimization on relational databases.
As hospitals adopted consignment planning programs, inventory progress slowed. The turns are the lowest of any industry, and despite investments in technologies and processes, inventory turns have only improved 3%, and Cash-T0-Cash (C2C) cycles have declined 4%. This precipitous drop in margin hurts. Companies are feeling pain.
<Bear with me… > Here I share a nine-step process in an attempt to help companies unravel the process for buying supply chain planning software. They center on how to make a good decision in the purchase of supply chain planning solutions. Most have purchased software, but are dependent on Excel spreadsheets.
Excess inventory – it’s taking up your warehouse space, tying up working capital, and limiting your planning team’s range of motion. It’s time to Marie Kondo your supply chain by eliminating excess inventory and learning how to avoid it in the first place. Let’s talk about: What Excess Inventory Is. What Causes Excess Inventory.
Tom, the colorful warehouse manager, constantly heckled Frank for the increasing inventory levels while Ed, the quiet material/logistics manager, constantly questioned if there was a better way. He felt that inventory was no problem, he would just cut it at the end of each quarter to make the balance sheet goals.
Or agreement on the definition of supply chain excellence. As a result, functional excellence anchors action. The focus is on digitization—automating today’s processes—versus rethinking process excellence based on the art of the possible. In this case, the metrics are operating margin and inventory turns.
Gartner purchased the firm in 2010.) Driving Improvements in Supply Chain Excellence. He felt strongly that supply chain leaders knew how to drive supply chain excellence and needed a forum– or maybe two or three depending on the business model– to help them network and refine their approaches. I disagreed.
It was called multi-enterprise inventory optimization. In the beginning, the inventory management solutions of LogicTools , Optiant and SmartOps pushed to take operations research to a new level through supply chain optimization. SmartOps was purchased by SAP. They knew little about the software market. It is no more.
High e-commerce shopping rates combined with construction delays are causing a strain in the supply of new warehouse space, especially as companies shift their inventory management strategies from just- in-time (JIT) inventory management to larger safety stocks for better responsiveness.
This team is not buying the message. “I study supply chains. So much so, that three years ago, I founded a research company to focus on understanding supply chain excellence. In our work, we tie research from quantitative and qualitative studies to financial results to drive new insights. I am passionate about it.
Inventory management is a crucial aspect of supply chain management, and effective strategies can help businesses reduce costs, improve customer service, and increase profits. But what does a great inventory management strategy look like? But consider, too, how you can turn those needs to your advantage in inventory management.
Reason #4 Making key decisions by modelling the supply chain in Excel. Reason #6 Not effectively managing inventory. Social studies? One example that I’ve seen several times is around inventory targets. The result is a lower inventory level, but much higher expedited costs and reduced customer service. Don’t care.
Concurrent macro forces–material shortages, war, shifts in consumer buying patterns, logistics constraints, inflation/recession, and climate change– are reshaping today’s reality necessitating the need for a supply chain reset button. Focus on right-sizing inventories. These are our weakest links. What can be done?
At the Supply Chain Insights Global Conference in 2019, an attendee stopped me after the third case study of the Supply Chains to Admire award winner. In this blog, I share the case study of Sleep Number. As you read the case study, I hope you do as well. The Sleep Number Story of Supply Chain Excellence.
In today’s fast-paced and unpredictable global market, the secret to maintaining a competitive edge lies in a key area—robust inventory control techniques. Inventory control is the act of managing and organizing stock to meet customer demand without surplus or deficiency. This is where inventory control techniques come in.
By purchasing planning and transactional systems for a common vendor, they had one throat to choke and they were familiar with the architectural elements. In the study, the respondents were asked to rate time to Return on Investment, and satisfaction. Instead, he wants to drive supply chain excellence and build the metrics that matter.
In Figure 1, I share a composite orbit chart of progress of Cisco Systems, Intel, Samsung and Flextronics on the Effective Frontier at the intersection of inventory turns and operating margin for 2006-2012. However, no company in this chart is on a linear path towards improving both margin and inventory turns. What can we learn?
Love it or hate it, daily necessities need to be purchased. Whichever reasons fuel the motivations of your target market, here are the top trends shaping how they’ll buy – and how you can stay front of mind and ahead of the competition. eCommerce Purchases and “The New Normal” Retail Categories. Data source: eMarketer.
Bonuses and incentives align with functions and are often counter productive to driving supply chain excellence. Today, over 90% of companies have deployed ERP and APS, but as shown in Table 1, inventory levels have grown not decreased in over 80% of industries studied. Days of Inventory by Industry Across Years.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 102,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content