Let’s face it. As an avid Lean practitioner, I have an instinctive aversion to batch sizes. For a long time, I thought that the ideal would be that when a consumer needs something, it should be manufactured and made available, by the unit, almost immediately. And so any batch size – full pallet, full truck, … Read more
Associating intuition and S&OP processes may seem… counterintuitive, right? For most companies that practice it, the S&OP process involves gathering information, facts, and hypotheses to analyze and then use to develop an action plan — a roadmap for negotiating changes in the coming months. It’s all about data crunching, logical reasoning, putting together elements from … Read more
The vast majority of business leaders do not come from supply chain, purchasing or operations. For a long time, when you were in these professions, your marshal’s baton was to become COO or Chief Supply Chain Officer. Of course there are notable exceptions, such as Tim Cook at Apple, but you’re probably more likely to … Read more
Automation has taken over distribution platforms and industrial sites. Robots and machines are used to prepare orders and manufacture our products. However, supply chain planning remains a human prerogative — a task for planners, buyers, master schedulers, forecasters, supply chain managers, and so on. Is this is something to be welcomed or worried about? Companies … Read more
You have probably already seen this diagram, which summarizes different manufacturing typologies, in one form or another: Is the Demand Driven model a good fit for these typologies? How would your demand driven manufacturing implementation change to support each environment? In each of these flow typologies, with the exception of Engineering-to-Order (ETO), customer demand moves … Read more
What happens in our brain when we exercise our intuition? A French scientific magazine recently devoted a fascinating dossier to intuition (Science & Vie, August 2021 https://www.science-et-vie.com/archives/n-1247 ). It appears in particular that intuition is the automatic implementation by our brain of knowledge accumulated in our long-term memory. Far from being a random and therefore unreliable process, … 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
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
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
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
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
