Supply Chain Science

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Mar 6, 2023

The role of IT

In many, probably most, large companies operating a supply chain, the IT department has years of backlog. The backlog is made of a myriad of glitches, inconsistencies, or fragilities that could be fixed but aren’t. Besides creating vast bureaucratic overheads, this endless series of pointless annoyances demotivates everyone.

Dec 26, 2022

On noise, NPCs, chatbots, and supply chain

The state of supply chain communication is dismal. By way of anecdotal evidence, for the last couple of months, my daily morning routine consists of attempting to find one post – just one – that qualifies as _worthy of interest_ to an audience of supply chain minded people – in order to have it shared on news.lokad.com. This seemingly simple exercise proves exceedingly difficult. Most days, I do not succeed.

Dec 1, 2022

Supply chain resilience requires bandwidth

The last couple of years haven’t been kind to supply chains. In fact, the only thing that hasn’t been in short supply appears to be forces of disruption':' lockdowns, wars, inflation, etc. As a result, a newfound interest in ‘resilient’ supply chains has emerged.

Feb 21, 2022

Grand experiment on the TCO of a supply chain software

The price tag of a piece of software ranges from nothing, as it happens with open source, to quite a lot - enterprise software leaning heavily towards the latter. However, operating a piece of software always involves some degree of overhead. The notion of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) precisely tries to capture the cost in full, taking into account both direct and indirect costs.

Feb 14, 2022

Control and bureaucracies in Supply Chains

Over the years, it has become increasingly frustrating to witness that most companies seeking to improve their supply chain performance are setting themselves up for failure through their own RFP (request for proposals) and RFQ (request for quotes) processes.

Oct 19, 2021

Beyond time-series

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hammer long favored by the supply chain community has been time-series and, as a result, in supply chain circles all problems look like time-series forecasts. The hammering temptation is compounded by the extensive literature that exists on time-series forecasting beyond supply chain use cases.

Sep 20, 2021

Incrementalism is the bane of supply chains

Incrementalism in supply chain includes improving the forecasting accuracy, improving the service level, reducing the stock level, reducing the lead time. Despite its prevalence among large companies, this approach rarely yields any tangible benefit.

Jul 28, 2021

Supply Chain as a Service

In terms of predictive optimization, most supply chains are stuck in the early 1990s. As we started to address the root cause of predictive optimization failures, Supply Chain as a Service emerged as our business model.

Jun 29, 2021

Tidbits of supply chain terminology

The emergence of a terminology is, at best, a haphazard process. Supply chain is no exception and, in hindsight, a sizeable portion of supply chain terminology is inadequate. Confusing terminology hurts newcomers and seasoned practitioners alike. Newcomers struggle more than they should with accidental complexity. Practitioners may not realize that the premise of their field ismore shaky than it appears.