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…

Managing supplier risk, relationships and processes is high on the agenda in many companies, not least after the recent natural disasters that triggered many sourcing process assessments.  The prevailing model has been to reduce the number of suppliers and build long term relationships with tightly knitted EDI-based integration.  This is still valid, but as consumer demand becomes increasingly volatile companies are pushed to use new and alternating suppliers. Risk mitigation is also part of the picture.

Even (or is it perhaps especially) food retail operations need to cope with fast-paced change in assortment and to look at alternative supply channels.  Some examples:

• Seasonal products like fruits and vegetables are in demand all year around and are sourced from varying locations all over the world at the best price.
• More and more  consumers prefer to buy locally produced meat and fresh products.
• Price-sensitive private label products are often sourced from varying suppliers in low cost countries.

Common to all three is the need to create much more flexible approaches to supplier collaboration. Suppliers are often smaller units with less advanced IT systems and often the relationship is seasonal or temporary, which makes traditional EDI hard to justify.

How can you be innovative and collaborate smarter without a large system integration project?  I touched on this in an earlier blog post and concluded that you need software solutions that are Understandable (no training), Non-invasive (minimal integration) and Transparent (real-time shared data).

Supplier enablement spans pre-transaction (identifying suppliers, enabling RFI/RFP/contracts), transaction (collaborative planning and visibility, streamline the delivery process), and post-transaction support (settlement, performance measurement).  Here are a couple of transaction support examples: 

• A local supplier of meat can via an inventory collaboration tool get access to inventory levels by store and take on a VMI responsibility to prepare replenishments.  These are made available as shipments to the retailer’s logistics department for improved planning including pick-up from the supplier, transit handling in warehouse and store distribution.
• A remote supplier of seasonal products will, once the purchase contract is agreed, get an email notification that he has a PO waiting for acknowledgement, use a supplier portal to confirm quantities and delivery conditions, select the appropriate carrier and create ASNs and label the goods via the portal’s shipping tool.

The collaboration tools are there, also as cloud solutions.  So if you don’t use them today, it’s time to get started! 

How are you creating flexibility and agility to enable better supplier integration?

In preparation for the Charted Institute of Logistics & Transport Annual Conference, I answered the questions central to the conference debates:

Q1.  Is there a place for creative thinking in logistics today?
Yes. Creative thinking plays a pivotal role in business. Ideas bring new revenue sources and process solutions cut costs and improve services.

With businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) demanding better service, lower costs and faster delivery it is falling to logistics divisions of business to ensure these demands are met.

Q2.  Have we learnt all we can, has the stream of new ideas dried up or maybe we are all now experts in best practice?
 Neither business nor person should ever stop learning. There must be a constant stream of new ideas and a continual review of old thoughts that were not viable at the time.

Employees must be encouraged to look at how they work and think of how they can improve their own processes and those of the business and industry.  Whilst management should be encouraged to ‘go back to the floor’, there is ‘room at the boardroom table’ for the workforce.

The current ‘Best Practice’ is not the ‘Best Practice’ of the future. There will be changes – good and bad, manufactured and environmental, market and customer driven – that might demand amendments to or complete transformation of processes.

Changes in technology always influence ‘best practices. Before sophisticated warehouse management systems were introduced, stock checking, a relatively simple process today, required an entire warehouse facility to close for two days.  No stock in.  No order out.  No money made.  Current best practice is to use PI counting, but this is only until it is superseded by an ‘idea’!

Q3.  Where will new ideas come from?
Ideas come from a business’s greatest asset – its employees.  All people have ideas.  They have visions of how to do things better. As we move forward, ideas will become more collaborative. One great idea from one business will be linked to that of another. Whilst there is always competitive mirroring, innovation and collaboration are critical to the logistics business.

Q4.  Are the days of imitating the competition numbered?
Imitating the competition is not an option! Your business needs to be better that the competition and always at least one step ahead of them!   If a competitor introduces new ideas, processes or technologies, you need to look at what, why and when influence the change and how you cannot only learn from this, but find the means to better their solution.

In logistics, nothing stands still and those haulage firms and supply chain businesses that continue to come along for the ride are finding it an increasingly lonely place to be.

Agree or disagree? File your creative ideas as comments!

Carl Power is Director of Operations at CDC Software.

CDC Software is a sponsor of the Charted Institute of Logistics & Transport Annual Conference.  The 2011 conference takes place at The Marriott Forest of Arden Hotel & Country Club, Birmingham, England on 16th June 2011.

I will not tell you to automate your warehouse (or not) or to outsource transportation (or not). There are many right answers to those decisions, and they need to follow your business strategy. But 80% of the companies I talk to need to revisit these decisions over and over, and adapt to new markets, newly acquired businesses, increased volume and what have you.

The requirement on supply chain operations is that ‘it must work’ regardless if sales are up or down or if you just outsourced a warehouse to a 3PL operator. What I will argue for is building a software architecture that enables you to change, in either direction.

If you want that flexibility you need to embrace the principle of a Supply Chain Integration Bus and adopt a service-oriented architecture. You could argue that the ultimate solution is to go entirely for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to gain flexibility for scaling up and down and adding new processes. But if supply chain is part of your core operation and you deal with some level of complexity, do think twice before giving up control over mission critical transaction systems.

A sound approach is to combine on-premise software or internal clouds with SaaS solutions where best suited, something we call a hybrid strategy (aspects of this is discussed by Laura Smith in SearchCIO.com). From an operational standpoint, hybrid can mean “insourcing” some parts of your supply chain operation and outsourcing other. Either hybrid model requires strong ability to integrate processes and systems.

Let’s take an example: If your company acquires another company, you would most likely want to reap synergies by merging the supply chain operations. The obstacles can be many – the new company runs a different ERP or a different WMS, they use 3PLs for their logistics operation, etc. A traditional approach would be to merge to one single ERP – which can take years. With a supply chain integration bus, you can more quickly merge warehouse and transportation operations and with limited effort allow the two different ERP hosts to integrate to a common logistics solution. Or just get both supply chains on the bus to provide common transaction visibility, and then merge over time.

A supply chain bus approach (rather than point-to-point or a monolithic system) will help you speed up change and reduce risk by allowing a staged implementation. An essential part is that the bus can provide visibility across the supply chain by built-in knowledge about the process flows – regardless of integrated applications. Hence it allows you to embrace a best of breed model where you evolve and refine the solution piece by piece.

Does this make sense for your operation? Would love to hear your point of view!

Are you interested in logistics challenges and how people cope with them? Check out our blog posts on Supply Chain Execution  for thoughts and ideas.

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

Bend is a city in and the county seat of Deschutes County, Oregon, United States.