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Supply Chain Planning Automation

supply chain planning automation

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

Demand Driven and Supply Chain Maturity

supply chain maturity - ladders

We often get questions or comments about the level of supply chain maturity required for companies to be ready to implement DDMRP and realize the significant operational benefits it brings. These questions are sometimes paradoxical.  Many companies tell us things like: “DDMRP sounds interesting, and well-suited to our environment, but we must first achieve more … Read more

Demand Driven Manufacturing

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

Harmonizing Intuition and Data-Driven Approaches in Managing Supply Chain Complexity

intuitive supply chain: brain

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

Does the Demand Driven methodology apply to my company?

demand driven methodology - team

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

Small Data vs Big Data for Supply Chains

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

Do You Really Want to Do a DDMRP Software Pilot?

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

Let’s Simplify the Management of our Supply Chains

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” Leonardo da Vinci

Over the last few decades, manufacturers and distributors have made huge technological investments in their supply chains. At the same time, we’ve invested heavily in developing sophisticated supply chain management processes. Too often, however, any similarity between our technologies (ERP, DRP, APS, etc.) and our processes is a matter of luck more than design.

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