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
The Process of Software Selection. I am constantly amazed that business leaders can engage with technologists month after month (often over eight and sometimes over a year) to select a supply chain planning system and then call me to ask for help on the decision. How do you define excellence in planning? My struggle? “No.
When you talk to companies that have implemented enterprise or supply chain applications, executives will usually admit that they have under-invested in training and preparing users to use the new technology. Molex implemented a multi-enterprise supply chain networkplatform from SAP called SAP Business Network.
The Process of Software Selection. I am constantly amazed that business leaders can engage with technologists month after month (often over eight and sometimes over a year) to select a supply chain planning system and then call me to ask for help on the decision. How do you define excellence in planning? My struggle? “No.
Against my friends’ advice, I decided to drive to speak to 120 business leaders at the Gains Systems event. At the session, we discussed why companies have not made more progress on inventory management. In most value networks, downstream partners have progressively pushed costs and waste backwards in the extended supply chain.
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.
The Omni-Channel Fulfillment Network with Esther Kestenbaum Prozan. Esther Kestenbaum Prozan and Joe Lynch discuss the omni-channel fulfillment network. Esther is the Chief Revenue Officer at Flowspace , an ecommerce fulfillment platform that helps brands meet their customers’ post-purchase expectations.
End-to-end supply chain visibility, planning, and execution support software are critical in agile supply chain performance. The classical approach involves functional silos, sequential decisions, and Excel and people to render a plan executable. each with discrete plans generated typically in sequential batch runs.
of revenue on information technology (IT), only six percent of manufacturers drove performance at the intersection of growth and margin. Rise in Inventories. Less Effective at Inventory Management. Inventories grew twenty days over the decade. Sadly, most of it is the wrong inventory. Despite spending 1.1%
Millions of shoppers, like my Dad, are not going back to their old habits because there are now faster and more convenient ways for buying daily household needs. It excels on a union of E-Commerce mobile apps and last-mile delivery innovations. Inventory Optimization. Supply Chain Digitalization & Autonomous Planning.
In the process, there is a fine line between marketing hype and overpromising, making buying difficult. The race started in 2016 as a foggy definition of digital appeared in supply chain marketing from technology providers. Digital Supply Networks. Yet, the models depict traditional supply chain software deployments.
As my client explains that they are delaying their project to build network interoperability due to complications with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) upgrade, I tap my foot and sigh. While the desire to improve network interoperability is high, the organization’s mindset is focused on transactional efficiency.
The hype usually revolves around just one item and can easily be managed by a modern logistics system. This warehouse runs at a perfect optimum with fixed capital in the form of inventory balanced perfectly with sales and purchasing, and all the items perfectly distributed to the various storage areas of the warehouse.
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. I believed that the first generation of supply chain systems would improve operations to a greater degree than actually happened. I am sorry.
Technology can have a significant impact on supply chains, but supply chain digitization still lags behind digitization of other areas of business across many industries. Still, there are several technologies that are transforming supply chains for the organizations that adopt them.
If the industry were grounded in truth in advertising repercussions, there would be far fewer signs in the airports from consultants and technology providers.). I define supply chain excellence as year-over-year performance better than the peer group on this balanced scorecard. Shifts in Technology. Background. The problem?
Supply chain excellence is easier to say than to explain. The supply chain is a complex non-linear system. At each company, there is a relationship between the metrics of growth, margin, inventory, customer service, and asset strategy. The culture is dominated by “lifers” and technology investment is conservative.
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. Establishing real-time shared visibility and processes with supply chain partners facilitates identification and resolution of issues.
As an old gal attending multiple conferences (more than I would like at times), I have listened to speakers waft eloquently about the value of concepts like networks, big data, industry 4.0, For most digital became an excuse to implement more traditional relational database technologies. Most are excited about their new platforms.
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?) I don’t know. The reason?
The attendees were sitting on the edge of their seats to hear about the next release of Llamasoft software. The market for network design tools was growing at a moderate rate, and most of the market had invested in technologies from either i2 Technologies (then termed i2 Strategist) or Logictools. Reflections.
As an analyst in the supply chain market for 15 years, I have written many articles on best-of-breed technology companies purchased by a larger company. Today I am writing my take on the acquisition of Terra Technology by E2open. History of Terra Technology. Terra Technology is 15-years old.
Each executive has a different perspective on the definition of supply chain excellence, but they are never discussed and aligned. His organization purchased an advanced planning technology from well-known best of breed provider, and the implementation should have been successful, but it was not. What Is The Ring of Fire?
Nick Lynch is the Global Excellence Manager at Shell Lubricants, a division of Shell Global. It is just not enough to do a software upgrade or slowly push continuous improvement projects. He did this first by implementing demand sensing from Terra Technology (now E2Open) eight years ago. Nick does this well. The reason?
by Trevor Miles I have been in the advanced planning and scheduling (APS) space since 1995 when I joined i2 Technologies in Europe. My enhancements were to add the underlying technology and company information at the bottom which gives some context. . Let me start with the confusion between planning and execution. Their words.
In the work, I listen to existing processes to provide feedback, ideate with the team on potential improvement, share advice on the fit of technologies, and network leaders to leaders to gain additional insights. 60% change management, 30% process and 10% technology.) Instead, as an analyst, I work in an advisor role.
Will we transform and improve supply chain planning systems based on AI? 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. Again, who knows?
. <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. Polluted with well-intended marketing messages by over-zealous technology providers and consultants creates confusion. The genesis for this post stems from frustration.
Q: Is it only inventory disrupting the agility resulting from inaccurate forecasts by S&OP? There are seven primary agility levers: Analysis of Form and Function of Inventory: Form of inventory is the decision of what form to hold the inventory in: raw material, semi-finished good or finished good. Is it S&OP?
So, the parking spots are getting more and more occupied with drop trailers, meaning lot capacity shrinks while finding the trailer with the highest-priority inventory becomes even harder. Create a facilities “Center of Excellence.” Problem number three: appointment scheduling is a mess.
I am currently doing research on inventory management. In the research, I ask inventory planners to define resilience. Of the twenty companies interviewed, only one can answer the question, “Do you have a good inventory plan?” No technology in the market measures inventory health. Yes, I think so.
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.
This is why I host training twice a year to challenge existing technology paradigms. He feels that based on his years of experience with a software provider, he has a whizzbang technology. I would prefer for companies to invest in the building of outside-in processes, supply chain design capabilities, and network automation.
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. These technologies are mature. I feel that many of these technologies are now legacy. Here is my argument.
It should not be confused with the term Integrated Business Planning (IBP) which is the process and technology integration of business and supply planning in S&OP.) At Supply Chain Insights , we conduct twenty quantitative studies a year to understand the impact of technology and process decisions on business results.
The consulting team pitches a theme–vision of supply chain best practices, big data analytics, or demand-driven value networks– to the executive team, and a new project is initiated. The first evolution of technologies were built by best-of-breed solution vendors. The first step in the journey is a kick-off meeting.
As Raheel Hussain, Director of the Supply Chain Center of Excellence at Reynolds Consumer Products notes during a recent webinar , a level of synchronization is critical to systemically share information and cut down the constant offline back-and-forth (conversations) between different functions.
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.” The supply chain is a complex system with increasing complexity.
Last week, at Supply Chain Insights , as part of our monthly webinar series, I hosted a panel discussion on the current state of the healthcare value network. Pharmaceutical companies are struggling with falling margins and rising inventories. In our work with pharmaceutical companies, most executives wince when we mention inventories.
Orbit Chart of Four Industry Sectors at the Intersection of Operating Margin and Inventory Turns (Year-over-Year Averages for the Sector). Each P&L leader will game the system to improve bonus structure payouts. Lack of Focus on Form & Function of Inventory and Designing Network Flows. Winners Over Time.
The basic frame of supply chain planning–functional taxonomies for optimization on a relational database–must be redesigned before supply chain leaders can reap the benefit of deep learning, neural networks, and evolving forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Graph architectures also use different optimization technologies.
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. Confluence of New Technologies. Today, we find ourselves in a hype cycle.
Consumers want to shop anywhere, and buy in the way that they want to buy. Each year I go to the Consumer Goods and Technology (CGT) conference where speaker-after-speaker talks about retail/supplier collaboration. Share Data Freely and Openly through a Private Network. As things change there is no system of record.
You’re juggling production schedules, managing inventory, keeping an eye on finances, and making sure everything runs smoothly on the shop floor. Manufacturing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software integrates all your core business processes into one powerful platform. It’s a lot to handle.
Pirelli needed to move from using an army of representatives visiting dealer sites, showing them massive catalogs, and saying to the dealer, “You could buy this or this or this.” Pirelli’s digital transformation challenge was to use a new digital platform that could scale to meet its complex integrated business planning process.
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