Supply Chain View

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. […]

UPDATE 20/03/08: Since I wrote this post, Hopp has published a print version of the book with McGraw-Hill and moved from Northwestern to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. As a result, the download that was available free from the Northwestern website is no longer available. Apologies to anyone who has […]

I have just read a paper published in the Jan 07 edition of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) entitled “A new approach of forecasting intermittent demand for spare parts inventories in the process industries”. The authors – ZS Hua, B Zhang, J Yang and DS Tang from the University of Science and […]

In December 2006 I presented seminar for the CILT on Supply Chain Inventory Management, and this very simple demonstration comes from that presentation. It is designed to highlight the different levels of forecast accuracy that we can achieve for slow and fast SKUs. (As I mentioned in my post from 29 Nov 06, estimating forecast […]

Let’s face it, we never think our forecasts are accurate enough. We suspect there must be a better way out there. Often this is down to the simple fact that forecasting is never precise. How can it be? I often think that one of the most important eureka moments for a supply chain professional is […]