If you’ve been in supply chain for any length time, you might be wondering what caused demand forecasting to develop so many different ‘personalities’ over the years, such as demand forecasting, demand planning, demand sensing, and demand shaping. What’s going on? It’s easy to ignore all these as buzzwords, but that would be overlooking the […]

When most people think of supply chain risk, they often think about the impact of major unforeseen “headline grabbing” events – like the tsunami in Japan impacting automotive supply chains or horse meat making its way into British beef supplies. These are big, important and often unpredictable risks. But there is another kind of supply […]

The growing momentum around systems-based thinking in supply chain planning has given rise to a new concept called the “digital twin”.  There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately and I wanted to offer a few insights, including around the importance of the data model in high-quality decision making using digital twins. You […]

Using the Gartner Demand Planning five stage maturity scale, analyst Mike Griswold estimated on a recent call that retailers as a group averaged just 2.3 out of 5.0, leaving money on the table due to poor inventory performance. In a competitive vertical with thin margins, leaving any money on the table can have big performance […]

For firms with Advanced Analytics or Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their future, Gartner has just published a useful report with three findings that clarify the difference between the two technologies and offers insight on employing them for augmenting versus automating supply chain decision making. 1. Advanced Analytics is broader than Artificial Intelligence People often use these two terms interchangeably, but Gartner says that […]

Editor’s Note: Last year ToolsGroup became Microsoft’s partner for Multi-echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) in Industrial accounts. Microsoft’s Bill Moffett and I collaborated on an introductory blog on MEIO for manufacturing businesses. You can see Bill’s version here on the Microsoft website and my slightly abridged version below. Imagine a worker sitting in a convenience store, reading a […]

Trade promotion forecasting is difficult: getting it right involves factoring in many variables. Marketing people, who are often responsible for it, may excel at creating and running promotions. Forecasting demand data, not so much. This can leave supply chain professionals the tough job planning for, and responding to, promotions. To do this, the first hurdle is […]

Grocery stores, long thought to be immune to the “Amazon Effect”, were shaken in August of 2017 when Amazon acquired Whole Foods. While companies like Instascart and Peapod have provided home delivery for years, this acquisition was like a shot across the bow for many grocers. About 40 million homes are within 5 miles of […]

Gartner has identified five stages of supply chain planning maturity and they say that 70-80% of companies plan to increase their supply chain planning (SCP) technology spend over the next two years to climb to the next level. In their recent report titled Carefully Assess Which Tools Are Right for Each Stage of Supply Chain Planning […]

“Your inventory problem is scary because you’re selling out before you can make new items to meet demand”. That’s what Robert Herjavec from the TV show Shark Tank said to an aspiring clothing retailer after their pitch in Season 8. Many retailers agree that inventory can be scary.  Why? Look at the recent performance of […]

Gartner says we are entering what they call the ‘Experience Economy”, where personalization, speed, agility and the ability to predict consumer trends before they happen will separate the winners from losers (Aspire, Challenge and Transform in a Disruptive World, 27 September 2017). Gartner cites the customer experience example of guaranteeing that a customer’s equipment never […]

Since machine learning is a hot topic, we thought it useful to clarify the difference between machine learning and traditional statistics as applied to supply chain planning (SCP). Both technologies help you better understand data and are classified as analytics, but each takes a very different approach. By understanding the difference, we see that they […]