No, a balanced scorecard will not buy you execution that works. If you are engaged in how to implement supply chain best practices and flexible software solutions, check out the other posts on this site.

We think humor belongs in business, so we continue to publish new limericks to make you act, react or just have a laugh.

But a couple of moments later I saw the same effect again, so I turned to one of the R&D guys, quite enthusiastic about what I had just seen. He replied that it took just a few lines of code to implement this feature to the entire set of hundreds of dialogs. He said, “whenever focus is (re-)applied to an open dialog, it senses that and does an automatic refresh”. After all these years I am still impressed with the powerful capabilities brought to us by the latest technologies.

Indeed very refreshing!

/Pär

A couple of months ago I wrote about how information puts pressure on retail supply chains to improve on-shelf availability. This is especially true for comparable products like branded fashion products, groceries or home electronics. For private-label goods, another trend is pulling the requirements in a somewhat different direction.

Proactive store chains will use the store as a showroom, fitting room and experience center for customers to check it out, try it on, test the function or whatever is required. The extreme would be to keep only “one of each” in stock in the store, while sales is expedited via self-serve kiosks or mobile ecommerce sites. Now isn’t this close to the way it used to be in the infancy of retailing?

The difference is a supply chain that allows immediate home delivery – same or next day at a low (or even no) cost. We see moves also in grocery, with ‘this week’s menu’ (recipe and fresh ingredients) being packed and shipped straight to your door.

What will this mean from a supply chain perspective? It will change the network design and forecasting games. But if we leave that for now and just consider fulfillment, I see at least three important things to consider:

1. Consumer ordering & fulfillment will drive transaction volume – small quantity orders from your DCs will increase as more consumers place individual orders. The same goes for store replenishment – shorter cycles and smaller quantities.
2. Inventory must be available to all channels – you cannot reserve DCs for “ecommerce only” as the “order-in-store-for-home-delivery” segment grows. The pool of products must be visible and available across store, eCom and other sales channels.  
3. More complex POS transactions – new options for the consumer will drive increased need for smart consolidation in picking and shipping. Parcel shipment volumes will go up with more intelligent routing and load building requirements.

Bottom line: Regardless if you deal with branded or private-label products, your supply chain software must be up to it and allow inventory visibility across channels, scale to unprecedented transaction volumes, and support many different sales and distribution models.

Opportunities and challenges – the future will be fun for us supply chain folks!

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday practiced with the most enjoyable traditions of religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for applicable persuasions and traditions of others, or their choice not to practice traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2012, but not without due respect for the calendar of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our world great. All this without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are also accepting these terms:

This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/him or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. The wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Best Regards (Without prejudice)

Name withheld (Data Protection)

If you want a more serious discussion on the topic multi-channel distribution – look here!
If you need a clue, read the full article.

We think humor belongs in business, so we continue to publish new limericks to make you act, react or just laugh.

By the way: The English Channel (French: la Manche, Breton: Mor Breizh, Cornish: Mor Bretannek), often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. (Source: Wikipedia)

Lausanne is a city in Switzerland, located on the northern shore of Lake Geneva.

For many executives, though, true visibility is not attainable because many are still using spreadsheet programs (such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org) or standalone supply chain software program. Because of this silo-based approach, key data is not being shared throughout pertinent departments and partners within the supply chain – making transparency difficult.

To counter this, organizations need to invest in supply chain software solutions that can integrate easily across the supply chain to share information, contends Michael Koploy in a recent article on his warehouse software guide website. In the article, “Today’s Supply Chain Secret Sauce: More Visibility, Fewer Silos“, Koploy says there are three core requirements of supply chain software that can effectively improve visibility:

1. The solution must have automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) capability. This will automate data entry, increasing speed while decreasing errors.

2. Inventory information needs to be accessible and updated in real time throughout the supply chain.

3. The system must be capable of sending out notifications and alerts to important groups to let them know about important changes in inventory status.

I fully agree with these points, as they pinpoint that visibility alone, if ever so desired, is often not enough for many organizations to turn their investment light to green. Why? I have seen repeatedly that most find it easier to quantify gains from productivity savings and compliance than from improved transparency. But then if you implement process improvements using proper supply chain software, you will drive the creation and control of detailed, current and available information – and hence get the foundation for visibility.

So make sure to look both from the visibility perspective (and the needs that will drive integration and collaboration), and from the process design and control side (that will help you build the “hard facts” business case and “as a side effect” give you also visibility).

Let’s start with the train plot:

Imagine yourself sitting in a modern reliable high speed train. In the middle of nowhere the train tears down the high voltage wire, causing all signals to turn red and an emergency stop. Doors and windows must remain shut for passenger safety, and there is no power supply. Outside the sun is shining and the temperature is rising to uncomfy levels. The information about what happens is sparse as no power means no intercom.The crew walks around stating that ‘someone is investigating the problem’, ‘we do not know how long it will take’, ‘we will know more in an hour’.

After two hours, all passengers are sweating, the train crew is doing their best but are also getting frustrated. Meanwhile, train after train is passing on the parallel track…

Eventually, the train control center clears a later train to stop besides our train, so that all passengers can be transferred (climbing down and up on ladders between the wagons). And then you have to stand for an hour and a half until reaching the final destination so happy ending but five hours behind schedule.

Several things could have been better: information to passengers during the stop, compensation for the delay, and more… It is intricate to balance the different objectives of time, cost, passenger safety and services. I started to write this in agony but let it rest a while, and now I actually think the train company made the right priorities and decisions. I also think that they followed the below basic and very essential steps:

1. Define the scenario what disruptive situations could occur?
2. Identify potential problem situations make sure there are ways to collect information that compares planned and actual progress and captures discrepancies and events.
3. Detect and alert tie the specific situation to an escalation workflow and propagate the info.
4. Act to resolve problems a plan for the required measures and actions should tie to the elapsed time of the situation and to potential ripple effects.
5. Follow up verify resolution, learn and adjust plans and action instructions to improve, prevent and (best) eliminate similar situations.

What do you think had the train operator done their homework and prepared for preventive action according to this?

Are you following these steps and using event management software to manage situations like the above? If not, do.

Building event-driven actions into you processes will make the unexpected expected.

it has been some time, but today I feel an urge to share my thoughts on how companies often focus on trying to fix negative effects late in the supply chain instead of going to the root of the problems.

As a product manager, I speak regularly to customers in order to understand what they need, both in their current operations and as part of future plans. The discussions about current operations  are usually problem-oriented, which is natural, and I will stay there in this article.

So I often listen to various operational problems. It may be congestion in shipping areas when the picking operation overwhelms the ability to load and ship the goods away. Or it might be picking problems because goods are inefficiently located, thus demanding additional time and effort to get it out.

My surprise is that companies tend to accept the symptoms and find solutions to mitigate them, such as advanced planning tools or over-complicated work flows. It certainly creates awareness and possibly a kind of a solution, but it also creates extra cost and an even more permanent problem. I would rather suggest going back to the root problems and resolve those instead. Using these two examples, I believe the right cure, to start with the congestion problem, would be to improve the pick wave and transportation processes. Or, worst case, expand the shipping area space. The right medicine for the picking problem is probably a better put-away process. Or, once again worst case, to redesign parts the warehouse layout.

If I am not clear, here’s a third example with a quiz. When the pick face is empty, would you A) encourage the process of running around the warehouse to find some good stock, or would you B) spend your effort on improving the replenishment and stock check processes?

As you might guess, I strongly believe in working actively with improving processes in combination with an event management solution which would alert the appropriate people when something goes wrong. Because it does, even with the best of processes in place. Though not as often.

Are you struggling with demand-supply matching and long lead times? Revisit our posts on supplier collaboration and inventory visibility?

We think humor belongs in business, so we continue to publish new limericks to make you act, react or just laugh.

Rye, NY, USA and Rye, East Sussex, UK are both small towns located very far from China…