My good friend, Lora Cecere, recently posted an article on her Supply Chain Shaman blog titled, Conquering the Effective Frontier. It was one of the subjects at her Supply Chain Insights Global Summit, and I couldn't be more excited to hear more! Lora's research finds that when the economy goes into
Do we ever really get pricing right? Sometimes we do, and some of those times are actually on purpose, but it takes a lot of upstream activities to go right in order for pricing to be optimal as well. Too often pricing is that last variable at our disposal when
Everyone wants to be efficient. Everyone wants to do a good job. And yet, inefficiency abounds. Islands of efficiency are set up when individual goals of a person or location override the efficiency of the whole network. In the "intended island of efficiency" each person or persons, working in their little
This quote from Gandhi (similar to one made centuries earlier by Lao Tzu), is the typical formulation we learned in Psychology 101: beliefs precede attitude, which precedes behavior, and the conclusion typically arrived at is that in order to change behavior you need to get to the root cause and change beliefs.
Three "related" events occurred over the past six months that caught my eye. The first one was the Gartner Hype Cycle for Analytic Applications that came out August 8, 2012. The second one was the announcement, in February, of SAP acquiring their long time partner, SmartOps. The last was Lora
Modern manufacturing has come a long way in employing rigorous quality initiatives, but when a defective toy, electronic – or even a baby diaper – does slip past the quality initiatives, the current customer sentiment climate can make the situation go from bad to worse very quickly. It isn’t easy
~ Contributed by Ritu Jain ~ Tough market conditions and a sluggish economy have made manufacturers focus even more on supply chain costs. Per an IDC survey earlier in the year of 400+ manufacturers and about 180 retailers “reducing procurement, production, transportation, and logistics costs” came out to be the
