These essential supply chain capabilities will raise product availability and right-size inventory There’s a lot these days that doesn’t go as planned. Like slow-moving inventory. Special promotions. Pandemics. The global economy. This ebook reveals the essential capabilities of supply chains that achieve their target service levels while optimizing inventory–no matter how complex their supply chain […]

“Good old supply chain. It just gets simpler every year!” … said no VP of supply chain ever.  We’ve created quite a monster with all the sophisticated tools we use to influence demand with pricing, new product introductions and promotions. Internet-fed trends are changing at hyper-speed. As businesses use more “levers” to influence demand, demand […]

The anticipation, the demand curve and spending patterns during the promotion, and the post promotion periods all require unique logic with machine learning to keep customers happy and balance inventory. Here’s how to understand the lifecycle of your promotions for better results.  How do you handle promotions? Promotions are a way of business for most […]

Demand forecasting augmented by machine learning helps you better meet customer expectations with reduced inventory investment.   Most companies view seasonality as a pattern of demand that has regular and predictable change occurring every calendar year, like beer sales rising in the midsummer months, and cold medicine in the winter. This foundation has been the […]

Anyone who has done demand planning knows it is extremely complex, with forecasting challenges and rapidly shifting consumer demand, often exacerbated by seasonality, new product introductions, promotions, and myriad causal factors (e.g. weather, social media). The good news is that these characteristics make demand planning a perfect fit for machine learning solutions. In fact, supply […]

Supply chain planning in emerging markets is different. And while each market can be unique, we found a few repeating themes in our own experience and from sources including Gartner and our customers Procter and Gamble (P&G) and Cipla Medpro. Here’s what we found: 1. All emerging markets are not alike, and even within markets […]

Project & Objective We’ve all been there: a loose rock flies up out of nowhere and cracks the windshield. Every year this happens to roughly fifty of every 1000 car owners. These cracks, along with road accidents and criminal acts that also damage and break glass, occur randomly. For NSG Group’s Automotive Glass Replacement (AGR) […]

At last year’s Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference analyst Tom Enright summarized the essence of successful demand forecasting with the following statement: “Demand forecast accuracy depends on your ability to recreate the environment in which historical demand occurred.” While seemingly innocuous, this statement represents a significant departure from conventional thinking. The traditional approach is to […]

Gartner recently polled both users and vendors on which types of supply chain planning (SCP) applications were employing machine learning technology. In three different analysis, demand planning and demand forecasting came out on top of the list. With years of experience now in the rear view mirror, machine learning has matured as a SCP technology. “Early adopters” have […]

Project & Objectives When an internal analysis at Mitsubishi Electric Europe revealed that one of its spare parts businesses was doubling obsolete stock nearly every two years in order to achieve 87 percent service levels, it knew there must be room for improvement. But by how much? The company needed to get inventory levels back […]

Project & Objectives Rebecca Roberts, Director of Supply Chain Planning, realized that the business scenario called for a flexible, self-adjusting system with comprehensive statistical forecasting that could set stocking targets at an SKU-Location level based on demand variability, service levels, costs and other parameters. Solution The goal was straightforward enough: improve service levels and optimize […]

Editor’s Note: Microsoft’s Colin Masson, Global Industry Director of Manufacturing Solutions, sat down with me to discuss how manufacturers optimize their inventories. You can see a longer version of the interview on the Microsoft website or my slightly abridged version below. Colin: What are some of the global trends currently impacting demand modeling, supply chain […]