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.

Uncertainty Will Only Increase. Here’s What that Means for Your Supply Chain.

June 23, 2021January 26, 2021 by Bernard Milian

Okay, 2020 was an exceptional year with the pandemic. The impacts on our personal and professional lives were extreme. 2021 remains very uncertain. Measuring global economic uncertainty If we take a step back and disregard Covid-19, however, we can see that the uncertainty facing our companies is constantly increasing. This is not a consultant’s speech, … Read more

How to Simplify a Complex Supply Chain

June 29, 2021January 19, 2021 by Bernard Milian

If you live in an industrial or distribution environment, chances are that your product portfolios have multiplied over the last ten or twenty years. Marketing differentiation, personalization, configured items, depth of distribution networks: these are possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of references to manage. In other words, there are tens or hundreds of thousands of references … Read more

6 Keys to a Successful DDMRP Supply Chain Transformation

June 29, 2021January 12, 2021 by Bernard Milian

DDMRP implementation has long been the domain of experimentation, pilots and deployments of limited scope. With a few exceptions, small and medium-sized enterprises, with faster decision-making processes, were the first a few years ago to adopt the methodology, as well as isolated sites of larger companies. Over the past two to three years, a new … Read more

Heijunka and Demand Driven Supply Chains

October 21, 2022January 5, 2021 by Bernard Milian

Let’s be zen in the VUCA world. What is Heijunka? In the implementation of a Lean pull flow derived from the Toyota production system, the Heijunka is an essential mechanism whose key role is to level load the flow. Typically, a Heijunka controls the pace and sequence of production on a given flow. As paradoxical … Read more

Small Data vs Big Data for Supply Chains

June 29, 2021December 8, 2020 by Bernard Milian

Instead of Big Data, Why Don’t We Take Care of our Small Data First? Big data and advanced analytics are front page news in the supply chain and have been on the rise for years in the vocabulary of consulting firms and software vendors. Accumulating masses of information, passing it through the mill of statistical … Read more

What is the Use of Forecasting?

June 29, 2021December 1, 2020 by Bernard Milian

If the forecasts are wrong, what is the point of forecasting? The subject of forecasting has been stirring the supply chain community for ages. We have invested a lot, and continue to invest in this subject, with a renewed interest in the age of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data. We are keeping our fingers crossed: perhaps … Read more

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

Materials Planning

Sales & Operations Planning

Scheduling & Execution Planning

Demand Planning

Auto Pilot