Bernard Milian

Bernard Milian has more than 35 years of experience in developing agility within industrial and distribution supply chains. He has more than 25 years of experience in Supply Chain Management and Continuous Improvement / Lean 6 Sigma transformation. He has served as a Supply Chain Director within French subsidiaries of world class corporations, in the automotive, electronics, medical devices, furniture and metallurgy industries, B2B, B2C, manufacturing and distribution environments.

Group Planning: A Productive and Agile Supply Chain

June 29, 2021November 24, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Developing an agile supply chain means reducing lot sizes, reducing lead times, and increasing replenishment frequencies. All this is virtuous to speed up flows, but can conflict with real and legitimate production or transport constraints. If you’ve been involved in Lean initiatives, you’ve probably faced these trade-offs. Reducing batch sizes increases the number of changeovers, … Read more

Batching for DDMRP Flow: What is the Equation?

June 29, 2021November 17, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Four years ago I was invited to introduce DDMRP to a team from a medical device company, a subsidiary of a German group. Supply chain, purchasing, production, quality were in the room. They wanted to know more because they were suffering from long lead times, too much stock, unsatisfactory service levels, and faced many emergencies. The company had … Read more

Do You Really Want to Do a DDMRP Software Pilot?

June 29, 2021November 10, 2020 by Bernard Milian

You’ve heard about DDMRP, you’ve browsed the web, you’ve read testimonials, maybe you’ve taken a training course, and you tell yourself that it can make sense in your business. So, why don’t we experiment live to see what happens? One advantage of DDMRP is its simplicity: the calculation formulas are simple, you select a few … Read more

Pull Flow Systems for All

June 29, 2021October 26, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Pull Flow, an Old Story…

In 1987, as a young engineer at Philips, I had the chance to take part in a study trip to Japan and visit about ten companies there. In most of them you could see in each workshop card boards. In one of the factories I asked our guide what it was. He was astonished that I asked the question – it was so obvious: it is a Kanban board, to replenish supplies. That is normal. It was a non-event, a practice that was not questioned, had been in place for decades… but almost absent at the time from our western factories. Kanban dates to the ’50s. Drum-buffer-rope dates back to the ’80s. These are old concepts. Are they adapted to our modern, technological age?

Developing Supply Chain Agility

June 29, 2021October 13, 2020 by Bernard Milian

When I was a kid I learned to play ping-pong on a homemade table. The boards were not made from one piece, but were made from planks that had been assembled. With time and playing in the garden, the wood had worked, the boards had spread, bent, deformed – it never stopped us from playing hard games, but the bounces were quite unpredictable!

Supply Chain Planning is Like a Relay Race

June 29, 2021October 6, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Have you ever watched a relay race? Each runner gives the best of his performance for his portion of the race, and passes the baton to the next runner in a predefined area. In a 4x100m relay, to pass the baton there is a 20m transmission zone: 10m before the 100m, and 10m after. This … Read more

Buffers for Dummies: How Buffers Can Improve Supply Chain Flow

August 25, 2023September 29, 2020 by Bernard Milian

A Demand Driven Buffer, what’s that? In the Demand Driven jargon we talk about “buffers” of different types. What are they used for? How do they work? This post introduces some basic concepts, which are explored in detail in the Demand Driven Institute’s training courses. Buffers and variability. If you have any experience in supply chain you … Read more

DDMRP vs MRP: Long Live Independence

October 21, 2022September 22, 2020 by Bernard Milian

In one of my previous lives, I was responsible for a supply chain where most of the suppliers were in Asia, supplying our European factories and distribution centres by sea. Historically our service was poor and our inventory was overflowing everywhere. Our Chinese or Thai suppliers only accepted monthly orders, and imposed at least 2 months of firm orders on their production plan … Read more

DDMRP for the Automotive Supply Chain: Beyond Kanban Techniques

June 29, 2021September 15, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Since the 1990s, the Western automotive industry has widely adopted the practices derived from the Toyota production system. 5S, continuous improvement is the daily life of automotive suppliers.Pull flow – formerly known as Just in Time – is at the heart of these practices. It is facilitated by the fact that the automotive upstream supply … Read more

How to Use DDMRP in Retail for a Promotional Campaign

June 29, 2021September 1, 2020 by Bernard Milian

“I understand that we should replenish our points of sale with DDMRP for permanent products, but can you also do it for promotional products?” Our client asked us.

“Uh yeah, well, it should probably work, but lets think about it a little bit…”

A year later, after multiple simulations based on sales history, and the implementation of a dozen promotional campaigns, the demonstration is there: it works very well, but the model needs to be adapted.

DDMRP and Human Driven Supply Chains

February 3, 2022August 25, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Long Live Technology!

Over the decades we have developed more and more technology for our supply chains, invented sophisticated algorithms, interconnected remote sites around the world, traced in real time the slightest event. This debauchery of means, computing power, software and complicated acronyms would tend to make us think that it’s all scientific, mathematical, electronic and fantastic!

The Fallacy of Precision in Supply Chain Planning

June 29, 2021August 18, 2020 by Bernard Milian

In supply chain management, we’re often asked to make quick, buffer-related decisions with the best information available. We do this in the real world, too.

Materials Planning

Sales & Operations Planning

Scheduling & Execution Planning

Demand Planning

Native Netsuite MRP Software