Q: My current ‘machine efficiency’ is almost 75% (available 75% of the time). I have 15 SKUs (identical by content) in all to make and sell with a total Daily demand of about 20000 units with a standard deviation/demand variability of 0.2. The available capacity is 30000 units/day. What will be my practical best-case capacity...
Q: My Production is often delayed. Every time they (the ‘factory guys’) have an answer at the nth hour. They blame me for bad planning. I am just a new joiner post my MBA. How can I analyze the ‘bottlenecks’ on my own? A: For a start your production order itself may have been scheduled...
How did VW Europe end up with so much inventory? – Is it really that bad? – What were the Supply Chain Pundits in this and that Tech with 300-page resumes doing? For a start they were hoping the demand at least returns to pre-covid19 levels ~16 million cars but the sales declined. Not their...
Cutting through the tech mambo Jambo of BTP. CAP, RAP, CPI, UI5. Developers just can’t explain anything visually with examples. Q: Why both CAP (Cloud Application Programming) and RAP (REST Application Programming)? Why not a unified development approach analogous to good old ABAP’er doing everything? A: CAP happened because SAP needed their own ‘full stack’...
Digitization is not the same as Digital Transformation which is another mouthful of a phrase that might mean something in Elbonian! . Look at these initiatives separately. Do not club it all under ‘Digital Transformation’. Big Consulting firms get away with it by packing everything together. Because they are Gods. They cannot be questioned. They...
Q: I bought a ton of SAP software. I do not know why. I do not even know if they work and who uses it and how. What can I do to get some business value out of my SAP investments? My BW system was last refreshed in 2022. No one knew those data extraction...
In Business as Usual, traditional methods of predicting market demand rely (or forced to rely) on historical demand in some or other form – trends, patterns, moving averages or short term consumption rates. If not wholly, in substantial measure. Some firms manage to go that extra length to build collaborative platforms for gathering everybody’s piece...
And the rest are at best inconsequential! Talking of planning and scheduling problems in a manufacturing context, the first important thing to get it right is to decide the ‘default’ objective of the plan (or schedule) and then work our way from there (given objectives change and for valid reasons) Is it to reduce backlog...
The (generalized) ‘Birthday coincidence’ problem and the ‘Gamblers ruin problem’ that are in a sense contra-positive to each other, are perhaps the most non-intuitive of basic probability problems. What sounds less likely (Birthday coincidence) is more likely and what sounds more likely (winning a jackpot) is less likely. For those who are not likely to...
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...
