This is HARD…
Having your supply chain management team make decisions about questions like the following is HARD if they are looking at screens like the one you see here.
- What to order?
- When to order it?
- In what quantities?
- With what priority?
About Richard Cushing
Unlocking Your Supply Chain’s Full Potential
If your supply chain is not undergoing a transformation, you are falling behind. If you have not seriously reevaluated your strategic objectives and tactics within the last year in light of new methods and options now available to you, your supply chain is becoming a part of history—not the future. Read blog How to Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals for Supply Chain Improvements Projects.
Our job at RKL eSolutions is to help our customers create a durable competitive advantage by helping them discover those areas where old thoughtware is holding them back.
We recognize that, as outsiders, we will never know as much about your business and your industry as you and your management team probably do.
But our job is not to give you answers.
Our job is to ask the right questions in order to help you discover where old, outdated (perhaps, formerly) “right” thinking might be holding you back from transformations that can lead to significant—not incremental—improvements in your bottom-line.
We are confident that we can help you achieve big breakthroughs in a partnership that adds value to your enterprise through a combination of
- Provoking strategic thinking about things like positioning of inventory across your supply chain
- Introducing proven tactics for configuring your supply chain and monitoring its performance
- Designing sound business processes that help you hold onto your new-found advantages
- Training key personnel to support the new approach
- Applying effective technologies that will support your new strategies and tactics
You are not alone
Even many leading firms are still struggling to comprehend just where they stand in their own journey toward supply chain excellence. So, you are not alone in this.
Frequently we find that there is little or no alignment between the corporate strategies and supply chain tactics and execution. No wonder that significant and sustainable bottom-line improvements are almost impossible to achieve.
After all, an organization that is divided—at war with itself—is nearly always in a constant state of firefighting. It simply has not the time, energy or management attention needed to achieve breakthroughs.
We can help you and your team learn to work effectively as “a system,” and even extend that effectiveness up and down your supply chain by engaging with your trading partners.
Our demand-driven, outside-in helps introduce new thoughtware. This new thoughtware aids in identifying what needs to change from the major strategies down to the hands-on details.
How are you approaching supply chain transformation?
What are you doing to overcome the inertia of believing you are “right,” while new innovations may not be given consideration at all? Where have you found success? Where have been your biggest challenges?
Click below to get in touch with us here at RKL eSolutions if you have questions about new features or need help with Sage X3.
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How to Calculate Safety Stock
In our work to help small to mid-sized business enterprises get better at managing their own inventories and improve their supply chains, we are often greeted with what seem to be fundamental questions. One of those fundamental questions is: “What is safety stock, and how do we go about figuring out how much we should carry?”
Interestingly, safety stock (s) really is not set independently. Effective safety stock quantities—if they going to be used at all—need to be set in coordination with the reorder point (r).
It’s All about FLOW in Your Supply Chain
As I write this, the 4th of July weekend is approaching. There will be lots of folks hitting the road to go various places. Most of them will be taking freeways, the Interstate system, and major highways wherever possible on their journey.
Why is that?
It’s all about FLOW!
How to Start Practicing Supply Chain Management
For years I have joked with folks saying, “I wish my doctor would stop practicing medicine. I want to go to him when he’s done practicing!”
However, I have to confess, now, that I’ve been wrong about that. It’s a clever joke, but built upon a wrong assumption about what it means to “practice” something.
Watch this TedEd video on practicing and you’ll learn why.
Big Data and Smart Decisions
While the quantity of information is increasing [vastly, every day], the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine–but a relatively constant amount of objective truth. [1]
Firefighting Your Supply Chain Is Not a POOGI
Someone (who shall go unnamed in this article) posted a comment in response to a LinkedIn post entitled Why Your Forecast Accuracy Hasn’t Improved. Here’s what the comment said:
I think that quite a few of us have given up on pushing for accurate forecasts and resorted to other options such as planning at the sub-assembly level and putting together strategies to allow for more “agility,” i.e., firefighting capabilities. I agree… that companies think they can grab additional market share or shelf space by offering more and more options, more varieties of items. This makes planning at the end item, not only inaccurate but, pretty much invalid as soon as the new product pipeline is updated.
Genius of Simplicity in Demand-Driven Supply Chain
Are your supply chain planners and production decision-makers constantly evaluating, examining, considering, checking and double-checking screen-after-screen, row-after-row, column-after-column of numbers in printed reports, in your ERP system, or in Excel™ workbooks trying to make decisions that are timely, accurate and effective?
If you answered yes, chances are they are looking at numbers like…
- Quantities on-hand
- Quantities on open replenishment orders
- Quantities required for open sales orders or work orders
- And more….
Optimizing Your Inventory and Supply Chain
Recently I read an article published by a smart guy. I know he must be because he holds a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree. He is also an “international master trainer and award-winning author” writing on supply chain and other management topics. [He shall go unnamed in this article, however, for reasons that may become apparent below.]
Therefore, you can imagine my shock when I read that, in his opinion, what it takes to optimize inventory, at a minimum, are: “fixed, known, certain, [and] reliable lead times; and accurate demand forecasting.”
This, I believe, will mean that a very small number of businesses will ever optimize their inventories.
Your Supply Chain Isn’t a Chain at All
Supply Chain in Flux
We like the term “supply chain.” And, it probably isn’t going away anytime soon.
The term is convenient, even though “chains” have evolved into “networks,” and, more recently, there is a growing realization that the “levers” that we used to think would help us control our supply chains just aren’t working.