With increased global demand, shortages, significant disruption, and other challenges, businesses have never valued time more. But like other disciplines, traditional supply chain management has relied on disconnected supply chain components, manual processes, spreadsheets, and verbal agreements that take valuable…
Many years ago, as in-house IT platforms and infrastructure gave way to cloud-based SaaS systems, security was a more substantial concern than the efficacy of the software itself. While cloud-based systems offer a host of advantages in cost, updates, reduction…
It would be an understatement to say the last few years have been challenging for supply chain management professionals. Trade wars and tariffs, the COVID-19 pandemic, stuck cargo ships, and port backups have stretched many supply chains and those who…
Modern manufacturing operates successfully using software applications across a wide range of functions. These include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and more. Today, many of these platforms are designed to work with automation…
The road away from spreadsheets, human intuition, and handshakes for supply chain management has been a long one. And a collection of best practices and standards for the SCM field has grown alongside amazing technological innovation. As technology has advanced…
A handshake, a phone call, a fax, or an email. Put the results of these communications into a spreadsheet, and the ship sails. While this paradigm of supply chain management was long the standard model, disruption, the new challenges of…
It’s no surprise to those in supply chain management that supply chain issues are just part of the job. What’s extraordinary in these turbulent times, though, are the number of disruptions and their depth. Add to that the inability to…
To say that 2020 brought record global supply chain challenges would be a gross understatement. With COVID-19, trade wars, weather events, port congestion, and other significant upheavals, many companies saw more disruption in a year than they had seen in…
Demand planning KPIs are a lot like the information shown on your car’s dashboard or your GPS. Speed, miles per hour over the speed limit, range to empty, average miles per gallon, and more are often displayed to help you…
Both demand and supply planning and materials requirement planning (MRP) have been around for a long time. It’s hard to imagine a modern manufacturing company without either one. With a robust MRP system, manufacturers can better control inventory, plan production…