To help organizations recognize and successfully deal with good and bad variability, Involvation has developed the Wheel of Five for Supply Chain Management. This article provides an introduction to the tool. In many boardrooms, the mantra is to improve service while reducing costs. That’s easier said than done, especially when forecasts are...
To help organizations recognize and effectively deal with good and bad variability, Involvation has developed the Wheel of Five for Supply Chain Management. Following on from the introduction, this article outlines the first case study illustrating a Wheel of Five guideline: ‘Avoid overload’. If it’s no longer possible to guarantee on-time...
At the start of the coronavirus crisis, when the nationwide lockdown came into force, the daily snarl-ups on Dutch roads suddenly vanished overnight. The lockdown has since been lifted and employees are increasingly going back into the office. Although many people are still working from home, figures from the National Data Warehouse for Traffic...
The term DDMRP has been around since 2011 and has received much attention in recent years. The promises are big: improved service levels, inventory reductions of 30-40%, shorter delivery times (up to 80% reduction!) and minimal costs. Are the windows in your Supply Chain department already fogging up? DDMRP is based on the fact that variability...
Part Three of this four-parter clarified exactly what DDSCM is and why you should want it. The only question that now remains is how DDSCM can help you in practice.
In Part Two of this four-parter we zoomed in on the importance of the ‘moment of decision’. Preferably, we should make a decision early if the information is reliable at an early stage, and late if it doesn’t become reliable until later. This is not always the case in practice, however, which creates a ‘planning mismatch’. This planning mismatch...
Demand Driven Supply Chain Management (DDSCM) is becoming increasingly popular – and deservedly so, in our opinion, because DDSCM offers huge potential – but the rate of adoption is still too slow for our liking. One thing holding it back could be the lack of a clear definition of what exactly DDSCM is. This is leading to many different...
In Part One of this four-parter we ascertained that demand-driven alignment is essential to break the service paradox. Although thoughtfully chosen targets and KPIs play an important role in this, they have limited scope. Luckily, there is another factor that you can influence, namely the ‘moment of decision’. In Part Two of this four-parter we...
Sometimes you learn about new ideas that are so logical that you think by yourself: why did I not come up with this myself? Recently I heard about a new app that enables you to pay for your visit to an amusement park, based on the time spent in the park. So as a visitor you no longer pay a fixed fee – which in the past forced you to spend the...
Breaking the service paradox Going on a family holiday entails a whole host of decisions. Some are made early on in the process, such as the period of time, destination and means of transport, and others much later, such as when and where to stop to eat, to refuel and to go to the toilet. There is a clear reason why you make the latter decision...