Articles
The Lean Supply Chain
Lean Isn’t Mean and Agile Isn’t Cheap
Back in 2014, I wrote a column extolling the benefits of a lean and agile supply chain, also known as a hybrid strategy. Depending on your product or service, your supply chain may tilt more one way or the other, or it might be segmented but still exhibit characteristics of both. For example, if you […]
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S&OP: Bringing the Outside In
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is an integrated business management process through which the leadership team continually achieves focus, alignment and synchronization among all functions. This ensures that supply meets demand while the organization meets general business objectives, including profitability, productivity, competitive customer lead times, and others.
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Supply-Side Accuracy and Timeliness in Volatile Times
While improved demand accuracy in your supply chain is critical, it is equally important to have supply-side accuracy and timeliness, especially now. The disruption the pandemic caused for global supply chains is getting worse, creating shortages of consumer products and making it more expensive for companies to ship goods where they’re needed.
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Demand Accuracy In Your Supply Chain
During the pandemic, a lot of the focus on supply chain tended to be on the supply side, and rightly so, due to the highly publicized sourcing, production, distribution, and transportation issues. As a result, organizations continue to look to increase productivity, flexibility, and agility through programs such as Lean, increased automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and others.
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Omnichannel Delivers, But at What Cost?
Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company of all, gained a competitive advantage through its two-day free delivery for Prime customers. Many other pure e-tailers and brick-and-mortar retailers moving to omnichannel retail—where customers engage with companies in a variety of ways, including in a physical store, or via websites and mobile apps—have followed suit to some degree.
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Professional Education: Time to Pay It Forward
The pandemic, for better and for worse, has shined a bright light on the supply chain and logistics functions.
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Omnichannel and Supply Chain Work Together for Competitive Advantage
The days of going to a department store to shop for a TV, viewing the options, and making a purchase now seem quaint. The emergence of the internet, smartphones, social media, and other technologies has opened a world of new options for consumers and businesses to review, research, and buy online with ever-increasing delivery choices.
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Lessons Learned: Risk Mitigation Strategies for the Future
Companies can help avoid at least some of the pitfalls of supply chain risk—including COVID-19—by developing risk mitigation strategies such as supply chain mapping.
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Traditional Retail Supply Chains Tackle Omni Challenges
Distribution centers (DCs) traditionally shipped orders in bulk to retailers or wholesalers. In the early days of e-commerce, most retailers used a small area in an existing DC to fulfill online orders or outsourced the process to a third party. As online demand grew, many retailers opened fulfillment centers dedicated to picking and packing individual orders shipped to individual end users. DCs and fulfillment centers have much different types of operations and cost structures.
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The Road Map Out of This Mess
For years, I have been a proponent of operating a lean and agile supply chain, but some now say the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the shortcomings of a supply chain that is perhaps too lean. To be “lean,” however, doesn’t mean maintaining extremely low inventory levels with no coordination or backup plan. It also appears […]
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