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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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2022 Forecast: Supply Chains Become Critical Infrastructure

2 February 2022

Let’s kick off 2022 with a little thought experiment… What’s a problem affecting every nation on earth? One that many people and organizations are talking about but few are acting upon? One that’s difficult to contemplate yet fundamental to the[...]

17 December 2020

Clouds are Gathering for an Open Platform for Supply Chain

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 and supply chain technology to vastly improve data accessibility. I chuckled today at the irony that one of the most “boring” things in 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 in our first post about uncertainty in demand planning, we said that in reality most companies are already part way down the path towards a probabilistic supply chain model. The evolution is happening naturally as the global business landscape[...]
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.[...]
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[...]