Integration: Every Functional Consultant’s Phobia. I just know the ‘module’. ‘They didn’t teach it. Integration is for ‘technical’ guys! I am an SAP functional consultant. I did MBA from a top university. Not bachelor’s in information technology. Yes, it is indeed for ‘technical’ guys, but even latter do not fully understand the pros and cons...
From Contract manufacturing through to 3PL through to Front end customer support operations through to Business Process Outsourcing to now euphemistically called Managed Services. It has been roughly a 25+ years journey of maturity in the Business of Outsourcing ‘non-core’ activities. Beginning with America’s largest corporations. Many once core functions became increasingly non-core over the...
No one ever paid for a Pizza delivery service. It was always free. It is best kept hidden in transaction value. These days every delivery service is a ‘product’. 2 hours, 4 hours, next day, second day, standard delivery for the same stuff are functionally different products. Customers balk when they are expected to pay...
Where does ‘Planning’ Start and End in Your Enterprise? Do you have a ‘Digital’ strategy for transforming your planning functions? Do you have the needed use cases, howsoever vague? What transformation are you really desiring? What ‘Big Data’ are you currently staging and using to better your demand and supply plans? Do you even have...
Free Consulting When do you call Demand Intermittent? When ADI >= 1.32 and CV Squared< 0.49 ADI – Average Demand Interval CV – Coefficient of Variation. (Look those up. I didn’t invent it) When ADI > 1.32 and CV Squared> 0.49 You cannot really predict anything. (it’s called Lumpy series) When ADI < 1.32 and...
Back to Basics / Free Consulting Why should we ‘do S&OP’? (Sales and Operations Planning), if at all, Here is how I brainstormed with a learned guy the other day. Just for philosophy’s sake. 1) Check whether Unconstrained Forecast is ACHIEVABLE 2) Check if there are any events that can DEPRESS supplies and hence Sales....
What’s my biggest achivement as a supply chain consultant? I pruned about 55 SKUs (finished products) at a client. (roughly about 8% of the SKU base then) What’s the big deal? SKU proliferation is the single biggest deterrent of efficient supply chain operations. For every SKU pruned, you unleash significant capacity (a highly non linear...
I never managed to understand Product Life Cycle Management. The notion of it. What am I expected to do by knowing the ‘definition’ of product life cycle management? Marketing speak. I can’t know ahead of time anyway. How hard it is to teach that some products do not even take off in the market? They...
Supply Chain Free Consulting. Where does Product Mix Planning fit into the MRPII/Interated Business Planning/S&OP framework? I have Petroleum – I can make Aviation Fuel, Petrol or Polymers. I need to maximize my profits. That depends on what’s in demand, what’s cheaper and faster to make and what gets more margins, what’s easier to handle...
Supply Chain Free Consulting Tons of academic literature on ‘Inventory models’ in Production x Distribution systems. But the best-case awareness is on how to look up a z value and area under the curve assuming demand is normally distributed. Thats what they teach in B schools. if someone bothers to know the ‘math’. E.g. Half...
