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Posts by Joe Shamir
Joe is CEO of ToolsGroup. He has directed major strategic and logistics projects in countless multinational companies. Today Joe is one of the foremost industry experts in the area of service-driven supply chain planning and automation, with articles published in Supply Chain Quarterly, Supply Chain Brain and Forbes, among many others.
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Clouds are Gathering for an Open Platform for Supply Chain

17 December 2020

If this challenging past year has taught us one thing, it is the value of connections--not only in our lives, but in supply chains. We saw this right at the start of the pandemic, when parts being manufactured in Wuhan[...]

30 October 2019

Four Ways Blockchain Will Transform Supply Chain…and Beyond

Public ledgers dating to the Italian Renaissance may help us see the potential of today’s blockchain technology for data accessibility.  I chuckled today at the irony that one of the most “boring” things in the history of commerce--the ledger--constitutes the[...]
12 April 2019

How to Make Supply Chain Complexity Work to Your Advantage

With supply chain complexity increasing at an unprecedented rate, perhaps the biggest challenge for businesses is figuring out how to navigate this uncertainty to deliver service profitably. Amazon sells more than 3 billion products through 11 different country marketplaces globally.[...]
8 November 2016

Why You Should Embrace Uncertainty in Demand Forecasting – Part 2

Last week we said that in reality most companies are already partly down the path towards a probabilistic supply chain model. The evolution is happening naturally as the global business landscape becomes more interconnected and complex, along with the effects of[...]
1 November 2016

Why You Should Embrace Uncertainty in Demand Forecasting

It's human nature to look for certainty. We believe that if we can predict the future with perfect certainty, then we will react and prepare accordingly. As such, we tend to put all our planning effort into making better predictions.[...]
13 September 2016

The Amazon Revolution, Part II: Tuning Your Multichannel Supply Chain to Compete

In the retail revolution, Wal-Mart first brought low-cost goods to the shelf. Amazon then brought low-cost goods—and the shelf—to the consumer's home, via low-cost fast service times. In our last blog, we discussed how Amazon’s low-cost service times, and the[...]
6 September 2016

The Amazon Supply Chain Revolution, Part I

Did you know the Amazon revolution actually began 30 years ago. At the time, retailers were rarely known for their investment in innovation and technology, but Wal-Mart went against the grain in the 1990’s when it introduced the idea of[...]
12 April 2016

What’s Wrong with S&OP?

“The No. 1 challenge among manufacturing companies is connecting sales and operations planning (S&OP) to operational plan/execution.” – Gartner Research1 There are few competencies more core for a company than the ability to coordinate sales with supply chain in order[...]
12 May 2015

Why “Sense and Respond” Supply Chain Planning Requires a “Single Model”

A single underlying model is a key technology enabler to the “sense and respond” strategy advocated by Gartner in our last blog post. Here is why. Sense and respond requires connecting functional processes with an immediate flow of coherent information, maximizing[...]
9 December 2014

Supply Chain Planning for Omni-Channel Holiday Retailing

At many retailers, holiday shopping is the Super Bowl of supply chain planning. Demand comes at you from all directions, at all times day and night. Filling that demand—in a way that makes business sense—can drive a Chief Supply Chain Officer to[...]
25 November 2014

Supply Chain Innovation: The Final Planning Frontier

In last week’s post we discussed how supply chain planning and execution are converging. This week we’d like to take the concept a step further and describe where this trend could ultimately lead to and what the final frontier could look like.[...]