Supply Chain View

(with apologies to Peter Norvig) Some time ago, the wise and well-respected computer scientist Peter Norvig wrote an article called “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”. I read it recently and found it so full of good sense I couldn’t resist taking the spirit of Norvig’s thoughts and applying them to supply chain management. Norvig’s [...]

Here is something very useful for humanitarian logisticians: the Logistics Operations Guide, or LOG for short, brought to you by the Logistics Cluster. But not only is it useful for those in the humanitarian sector, it is an excellent model for the clear communication of logistics know-how: succint, practical and well-referenced. (The big logo below [...]

It’s a classic technique: follow an order from receipt to fulfilment. Shapiro, Rangan and Sviokla wrote an influential article on the subject in HBR in 1992 (Staple yourself to an order). Now, with more humour, a YouTube version. An outfit called Business Process Excellence in the US have posted an 8 minute animation on the [...]

I enjoy making useful things freely available on Supply Chain View, so it’s good to find other people doing the same thing. There are 57 useful business statistics Excel files to download from the McGraw Hill website (to accompany the book Complete Business Statistics by Aczel and Sounderpandian). Among others, there are calculations for testing [...]

This is basic stuff, but as usual there is a lack of clear and concise explanations of this on the web. It is also very important, as most methods of inventory control can be reexpressed as some form of reorder point method. Hence this simple introduction. I have also prepared a Reference Sheet that summarises [...]

Paul Currion from humanitarian.info has written recently about Fritz Institute’s Helios Humanitarian Logistics software. This is a fascinating project: Fritz describes Helios as “a comprehensive supply chain technology solution that brings order to disaster relief, helping humanitarian organizations provide aid to people quickly and more efficiently” Paul notes that the first implementation of the system, [...]

Sometimes I find something on the web that I need to share right away. This is one of those times. MIT OpenCourseWare is a great project to provide an “open educational resource” for educators and students across the world by publishing course material from MIT on the web. I’d like to point you in the [...]

This is the second part of a two-part post. Part 1 was posted last week. 6. Optimise stock over the range The same investment in stock can produce better or worse levels of availability. This is intuitively obvious if we think of some reductio ad absurdum examples: all of our stock invested in a single [...]

This was prompted by a question on the CILT’s eDiscussion forum. I thought the topic deserved a little more room for explanation, so here are my top ten tactics for simultaneous inventory reduction and service improvement. I have divided this into two posts – five tactics today, the next five coming up in part 2. [...]

I have had a couple of conversations recently that have led me to think about how much overstock we might expect in a Pull supply chain even under fairly idealistic conditions. The first was with a colleague working on a redesign of a warehouse in which a large number of products had stock outside of [...]