Supply Chain science and tech
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Early Signals and Forecasting
With a product's success so often relying upon the latest trends, the ability to capture initial demand and detect new crazes is becoming increasingly sought after. Here we discover whether the rise of social media means that forecasting these trends is now possible and what companies can do to react based on early signals.
Assessing Supply Chain Software
Market analysts and consultants can be a useful aid in assessing the multitude of different supply chain software. However, too frequently, those 'experts' hide behind weak and irrational methodologies, instead of providing opinionated insights which would require a lot work from them. Far from being irrational, high-quality subjective reviews nearly always outperform cheap and naive methodologies.
Decision First Supply Chains
Supply chains have historically been built with forecasting at their centre, with the actual decision making process left to the intuition and experience of senior staff. We explore the alternative approach of putting ‘decisions first’, and how this philosophy vastly improves the supply chain performance.
Choosing your ERP
ERPs are misnomed. It should have been ERM standing for Enterprise Resource Management. It's a class of enterprise software that support many routine operations of a company. When it comes to choose an ERP, one must first understand the design and driving forces behind those products.
Inventory Optimization for SMBs
Inventory optimization matters for small and medium companies (SMBs). The choice ranges between investing in costly enterprise software to taking on the challenge of doing it manually in-house. For this episode of LokadTV, we explore this dilemma and try to understand what SMBs can do to get the best out of their, sometimes limited, resources.
Tail Risks in Supply Chains
Tail risks are sudden, unexpected events and they often kill companies. Brexit, the Covid-19 outbreak and Iceland's volcanic eruption are a few recent examples. Classic supply chain practices leave companies wholly unprepared for those events. This does not have to be the case.
The Role of Excel in Supply Chain
Forecasting demand and optimizing stocks are both usually done in Excel, even in large companies. Many CIOs have tried to move away from spreadsheets to no avail.
Demand Sensing, a Textbook Illustration of Mootware
Demand Sensing is yet another buzzword in supply chain that does not live up to the community's expectations.
Naked Forecasts Considered Harmful
Here at Lokad, our commitment is to deliver the best forecasts that technology can provide. As a result, potential clients often ask if we can provide forecasts alone instead of a full managed solution. In this episode of LokadTV, we explain why these naked forecasts invariably introduce a whole host of different problems and how, even with better forecasts, a practitioner usually end up degrading the performance of a supply chain.
Software Design for Supply Chains
Lean Supply Chain Management (Lean SCM) starts with a lean applicative landscape to support the supply chain. However, 'lean' in software is primarily a matter of architectural choices. Those choices define the class of problems where the chosen software design is a good fit, and where it isn't. Many supply chain problems stem from broken-by-design situations where core design choices conflict with real-world requirements.