Inbound Logistics Winter Reading Guide 2014

<em>Inbound Logistics</em> Winter Reading Guide 2014

If the polar vortex makes you want to hibernate, wake up your supply chain knowledge with the latest books by industry experts. Best practices and insights on everything from demand-driven processes to global logistics strategies will get you ready to spring into action.

Demand-Driven Inventory Optimization and Replenishment: Creating a More Efficient Supply Chain

By Robert A. Davis

Davis presents the fundamentals of inventory optimization to help practitioners attain a demand-driven supply chain. He reveals why many of today’s inventory systems don’t make the most of their supply chain, and how faulty replenishment processes can lead to wasted time and effort. Drawing on his more than 20 years of supply chain experience at Nestlé, ConAgra, and SAS Institute, the author explains how to shift from supply-driven to demand-driven methodologies, create an efficient supply chain using just-in-time functionality, and optimize inventory policies and replenishment plans.

Key Takeaways: Every company faces the challenge of matching its supply volume to customer demand. How well the company manages this feat has a major impact on its profitability. Through demand-driven inventory optimization and replenishment, the supply network can function as a synchronized entity to support the customer-facing service level requirement.


Hazardous Material (HAZMAT) Life Cycle Management: Corporate, Community, and Organizational Planning and Preparedness

By Robert Jaffin

A useful guide for anyone charged with managing hazmat shipments, this book covers the various classes and definitions of hazardous materials; the regulations and standards governing them; risk, vulnerability, and emergency response planning; and hazmat-related issues facing private business, government, and non-profit/non-governmental organizations. Jaffin also addresses packaging, materials handling, and transportation considerations related to hazmat shipments.

Key Takeaways: Hazardous materials are a unique but extremely diverse group of materials that requires special consideration by supply chain managers. Logisticians and packaging specialists must be involved throughout the entire production and transportation process to ensure hazardous materials shipments maintain the necessary moisture, temperature, and pressure levels.

Developing Sustainable Supply Chains to Drive Value: Management Issues, Insights, Concepts, and Tools

By Robert Sroufe and Steven Melnyk

In the past, sustainability was seen as a trade-off—companies could be more sustainable, but profits would suffer. Today, however, businesses are discovering ways to be both sustainable and profitable. Logistics and supply chain professionals will benefit from this book’s integrated, business-oriented treatment of sustainable supply chain management. Readers will learn how to reduce waste, enhance value, establish metrics to measure performance, and generate a strategic competitive advantage.

Key Takeaways: Common benefits of sustainable supply chain management include cost reduction—both the product’s whole-life costs, and the organization’s overall operating costs; increased competitive advantage, profits, and innovation; decreased damage to the environment and human health; the potential to gain new customer market segments; and risk mitigation.

Procurement 20/20: Supply Entrepreneurship in a Changing World

By Peter Spiller et al

Today’s procurement managers struggle to develop cutting-edge sourcing strategies, exploit favorable market conditions, optimize supply chains to reduce costs across the value chain, and manage complex global supplier and contract manufacturer networks. This book offers procurement best practices pioneered by leading companies that focus on building a dynamic sourcing footprint, orchestrating the end-to-end value chain, translating sourcing risk into competitive advantage, and mastering data-driven decision-making.

Key Takeaways: To achieve change in your procurement operations, define a medium-term future for each element of the transformation. Having a sense of where you want to be in three to five years gives you the immediacy, urgency, and tangibility you need to inspire stakeholders, set a rapid pace for change, break through resistance, and motivate your entire organization.

Demand-Driven Forecasting: A Structured Approach to Forecasting, Second Edition

By Charles W. Chase Jr.

Essential reading for every professional responsible for forecasting and demand planning, Demand-Driven Forecasting includes the latest theoretical developments, while presenting current empirical findings and technology advancements. The second edition features new case studies and examples, along with coverage on demand-shifting, non-seasonal and seasonal models, transfer functions, and cross-correlation function plots.

Key Takeaways: To become demand-driven, your business needs to identify the right market signals, build demand-sensing capabilities, define demand-shaping processes, and effectively translate demand signals to create a more effective response.

LEAN Supply Chain Planning: The New Supply Chain Management Paradigm for Process Industries to Master Today’s VUCA World

By Josef Packowski

Managing supply chains in a business environment ruled by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) requires more than minor operational modifications. To meet the challenge, manufacturers must adopt an entirely new way of coordinating and synchronizing their global networks, writes author Packowski, an industry consultant with more than 25 years of experience guiding operations management for companies such as Bayer, Merck, and Novartis. The Lean supply chain management planning concepts outlined in this book help logistics professionals relieve the pain points along their supply chain—from the strategic dimension to the daily operational level—amid VUCA challenges.

Key Takeaways: The real issue in supply chain management is not improving sales forecast accuracy and reducing the amount of uncertainty—the path to success lies in eliminating the need for certainty in operational planning. Within the new Lean supply chain paradigm, logistics professionals can master variability with a two-sided approach, managing the effects of demand variability both on manufacturing capacities and in inventories.

Global Logistics Strategies: Delivering the Goods

By John Manners-Bell

It’s the rare supply chain that doesn’t have a global component, and logistics managers must achieve new levels of agility and flexibility to keep operations running smoothly. This book addresses six key logistics segments—freight forwarding, contract logistics, shipping, road freight, air cargo, and expedited—and examines major vertical sectors including automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical, and retail. Author Manners-Bell explores emerging global distribution hubs, supply chain risk management, and best practices for outsourcing global logistics management.

Key Takeaways: Underlying every strategic management decision is a responsibility to deliver reasonable returns on stakeholders’ capital investments, while also successfully providing customer-aligned services. To make these decisions, logistics managers must be acutely aware of the global economic and demand-side trends affecting their customers, as well as the unique dynamics of their own market.

Regulating Transport in Europe

By Matthias Finger and Torben Holvad, eds.

Europe’s transportation system has experienced substantial changes over the past two decades, in terms of ownership and competition. In this book, a group of academics, economists, and researchers address how regulatory reform has affected Europe’s air, rail, road, inland waterway, and intermodal transport. They also provide timely policy recommendations, including possible future European policy initiatives. Logistics professionals managing European operations will gain significant insights about the regulatory issues affecting transport economics and planning for every mode.

Key Takeaways: The process of liberalization—changes in market access regulations toward a more entry-friendly regime—has profoundly influenced Europe’s transportation sector, opening up the market for competition. Liberalization has generally been accompanied by re-regulation, leading to the creation of sector-specific regulatory authorities, whose main role is to open up and sustain markets for the benefit of shippers and transportation providers.

The Logistics and Supply Chain Toolkit

By Gwynne Richards and Susan Grinsted

Need a sure fix for subpar pick accuracy? Want an easy-to-follow plan for setting up a Kanban circuit? Wondering how to quickly calculate dock space requirements? This book is packed with more than 90 tools to help supply chain and logistics managers tackle everyday issues related to warehouse and transportation management, logistics technology, and service provider performance. It introduces frameworks, models, quick calculations, and practical ideas that enable you to identify solutions and improve operational effectiveness.

Key Takeaways: From optimizing warehouse layout to mastering demand forecasting, the tools in this book—along with helpful suggestions about when and how to use them—offer a comprehensive resource for achieving supply chain excellence. The authors also provide guidance on general management and problem-solving strategies, and a companion website supplies electronic versions of many of the tools featured.

Supply Planning with MRP, DRP, and APS Software

By Shaun Snapp

Enterprise software solutions for materials requirement planning (MRP), distribution requirement planning (DRP), and advanced planning and scheduling (APS) can be powerful tools— if you know how to use them. This book explains five different supply planning methods and how they are incorporated into various supply planning applications. It also covers constraint-based and reorder point planning, backward and forward consumption, scheduling, and simulation.

Key Takeaways: Supply chain managers will learn how to choose the right supply planning method for their operations, avoid common supply planning software implementation issues, and configure software solutions for maximum effectiveness.

Demand Driven Performance: Using Smart Metrics

By Debra Smith and Chad Smith

The authors explore the new rules needed to succeed in the complex and volatile global demand and supply landscape. Chapters address types of variability, shifts in management accounting, and the evolution of flow and return on investment. An in-depth case study about Boeing’s Dreamliner project helps illustrate the concepts covered, and a cheat sheet for managing a demand-driven performance system gives readers tools to improve their operations.

Key Takeaways: Metrics tell us how we are doing based on what we want to achieve, yet many companies struggle to define what they want to achieve. Organizations can better respond to demand if they state the problem, discover the root cause, set a framework for managing the organization’s operational systems, then define metrics to direct action and align priorities.

Sustainable Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Principles and Practices for Sustainable Operations and Management

By David B. Grant, Alexander Trautrims, and Chee Yew Wong

Three supply chain sustainability experts offer logistics students and professionals insights on the scope of the supply chain from point of origin to point of consumption; the logistics factors affecting the natural environment, beyond carbon emissions; and in-depth coverage of sustainability issues related to product design, procurement, freight transport, warehousing and storage, purchasing, and reverse logistics. Topical case studies provide real-world examples.

Key Takeaways: Because logistics and supply chain operations permeate almost every aspect of our lives, their ability to impact the natural environment are significant. Logistics and transportation service providers, shippers, and both government and non-government policymakers share responsibility for greening the supply chain.

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