Supply Chain View

Trying to present statistics in an interesting and engaging way is terribly challenging. In the supply chain world, we often have to communicate rather dry numbers that imply significant conclusions for how our business should be run. This has been kicking around the internet for some time now, so apologies if you’ve seen it before. [...]

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 [...]

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept [...]

Sometimes people get hung up on semantics. Sometimes it pays to be clear – very clear. I am currently trying to wade through some waters muddied by misunderstanding and poor use of terminology. My employer has had some good quality experience of Lean (albeit in a fairly small section of its operations) for about four [...]

There was a pretty depressing story in the Guardian a few days ago that proposes, in typical newspaper hyperbole, that Britain is in the grip of a numeracy crisis. For once, the concern is justified. According to the article, there are 3 times as many UK adults with poor numeracy than poor literacy. That’s 15.1 [...]

You wouldn’t expect a great lesson in Six Sigma from an alcoholic Beat novelist, would you…? This is from Charles Bukowski‘s first novel, Post Office, which is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s “career” with the US Postal Service, delivering and sorting mail. I’ve mainly paraphrased the episode in order to respect the author’s copyright. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Is there a developing backlash against Six Sigma? Scott Adams published a Dilbert strip in November last year with the punchline “Why don’t we jump on a fad that hasn’t already been widely discredited?” (Dilbert strips are now available online for only one month, but Gemba Panta Rei provide a full transcript in a post [...]