The Lean Supply Chain

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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Accounting for Lean

While it’s one thing to have a lean supply chain, it’s another thing to properly account for it.

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Supply Chain AI: This Time It’s for Real

Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are hot topics these days, especially in supply chain circles.

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Drilling Deeper Into Your Supply Chain

Data analytics is the science of examining raw data to help draw conclusions about information. When applied to the supply chain, it allows companies to drive insight, make better business decisions, and verify or disprove existing models or theories. Data analytics breaks out into the following categories: Descriptive analytics. In supply chain, descriptive analytics helps […]

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