If you are an operational supply chain manager, you have a taste for action. Reacting quickly, making fast decisions, getting a small dose of adrenaline under stress: this is your daily life. If you are an operational sales manager, you need to get things moving. Signing a deal, providing a decisive answer that leaves the … Read more
DDMRP was put into the public domain in 2011, when the third edition of Orlicky’s Materials Requirements Planning book was published. It was also in 2011 that Demand Driven Technologies was created. The first versions of the Replenishment+ material requirements planning and DBR+ production planning solutions had been developed in the mid-2000s by the Constraint … Read more
In my career, I must have participated in more than 200 monthly S&OP meetings, at the level of a factory or industrial group management committee. A recurring challenge during these reviews was to get the team to look over the horizon and prepare the company to face its medium/long term challenges in a coordinated and … Read more
We are all different… The question is a recurring one. “We manufacture to order, is this relevant to us?” “For the automotive industry, yes, but we are in the aerospace industry, we have many more items!” “We have many constraints, is it compatible?” “It’s for large corporations, isn’t it? We are a SME!” “Okay for … Read more
Industry 4.0 and digitalization are on the rise. Technology is moving into our shop floors. LCD touch screens are gradually replacing physical boards and post-its. However, we must recognize that the vast majority of our workshops, however complex, are planned or scheduled in Excel, right? The promise of scheduling algorithms Scheduling solutions have existed for … Read more
Decades of Lean and continuous improvement initiatives have profoundly changed the way many companies operate. We have gone from a traditional organization — with a hierarchical structure of leaders who make decisions and implementers who obey — to a network of men and women who each use their knowledge to improve performance every day. At the … Read more
Hm, seeing the visual illustrating this post I had some objections: is it really reasonable to represent the measures of a supply chain in the 21st century as following a normal law? No, certainly not – the measures do not follow the normal law, while we live more than ever in a new (ab)normality. However, … Read more
Orchestrating the launch of new products is one of the processes you need to define when designing your Demand Driven model. It uses special techniques for several reasons: Since this is a new product, you have no historical demand The uncertainty on the demand profile is greater than for a mature product There can be … Read more
Flow Profiles vs Inventory Buffer Profiles For DDMRP inventory management, buffer profiles are defined. A buffer profile groups together articles with similar characteristics – replenishment times, demand variability, supply variability. This will allow to assign identical buffer sizing rules to all these articles (red, yellow, green zones, detection of demand spikes, etc.). When it comes to building a … Read more
Music, Rhythm, and Material Flow If you are a musician, or just a music lover, you probably have the rhythm in your skin! From classical to pop, rock, electro, or the “flow” of a rapper, music is a flow, isn’t it? The common point in most of these forms of music – at least Western … Read more
Every time I visit a factory, I ask myself the following questions: Do we see the flows? Does material visibly flow? What are the process steps that set the tempo? Do we see this tempo? Are we early or late? How do we see it? What should be manufactured after the current batch? What are … Read more
