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Production planning means striking a balance between shop floor efficiency and the agility required to meet customer needs. Planners and schedulers are torn between the injunctions of customers, production, and finance – reducing lead times, serving new urgent orders, resources optimization, limiting the time spent on changeovers, stabilizing the schedule, not being under constant stress … Read more

Global companies often have “gas plant” supply chains. For all sorts of reasons – historical, internal politics, IT, etc. – everything seems to have been done to make things more complex. Organizations are fragmented.  Of course, if you’re a global corporation, you need to structure teams into manageable entities, so it’s necessary to articulate business … Read more

I think supply chain managers see themselves as pragmatic, concrete people.  Confronted with the reality of customers to deliver to, production resources to manage as best they can, and supplier relations to nurture, they should have both feet on the ground and some common sense.  There’s really no room for magic in this field, is … Read more

In one of my first professional experiences, at the end of the 80s, I was in charge of the methods team at an industrial site. Our team included specialists in time studies, who had applied MTM (Methods Time Measurement) methods to best evaluate routings. In particular, these routings were used to define productivity targets. We … Read more

Our companies operate according to plans. We draw up forecasts, draw up budgets, formalize a production program, and allocate our resources to execute this plan. MRP2 logic is firmly rooted in this principle: business plan, S&OP, master production schedule, capacity and bottleneck network, everything follows and cascades in a hierarchical and deterministic manner, with plans … Read more

At our French user conference in June 2023, our partner DFYA reminded us that we’re constantly making a huge number of decisions. One figure put forward is 35,000 decisions per day for an adult human. If you do an Internet search on the number of decisions per day, Google will indeed give you 35,000. However, the … Read more

Today we announce the partnership between Demand Driven Technologies, specialists in DDMRP, and SKU Science, specialists in demand planning. What are the benefits of this collaboration for supply chain professionals? With the need for speed, agility, and resilience, the supply chain has become the beating heart of modern businesses, playing a crucial role in determining … Read more

Implicitly, when we think to pull flow, Kanban, for example, we think of short lead time. We trigger the next supply to renew consumption, so this implies a rapid reaction time, doesn’t it? On the other hand, for components with long lead times – say, for example, an item with a replenishment lead time of … Read more

“Transformation” is the buzzword of the moment. “Digital” transformation, “Supply Chain” transformation, “Demand Driven” transformation, “Demand Driven Digital Supply Chain” transformation – let’s go for it!… ASCM is even announcing a new APICS CTSC training and certification course: Certified in Transformation for Supply Chain CTSC Exam Content Manual (ascm.org). For supply chain leaders, the ability to … Read more

In the plants I worked in, I started orchestrating S&OP processes in the late 80s/early 90s. I always considered that it should be a monthly process – without necessarily asking too many questions. In a factory, it’s natural to have reviews for each shift, daily, weekly, and monthly. A yearly budget, possibly a quarterly review. … Read more

To make use of forecasts in a conventional MRP system, you generate supply orders, called planned orders, that align perfectly with the timing of these forecasts. The example below is a consumer item – a drink. Sales of this item are driven by seasonality and promotions. Understanding Seasonality and Promotions When analyzing the sales of … Read more