Inventory balances sales and supply. To become more competitive, management continue to make their organisations more efficient. But this has made their Supply Chains more complex. These competitive initiatives have ranged across: increased item (SKU) numbers, additional sales channels, quicker delivery times, outsourcing, global sourcing and low cost country sourcing. As complexity has increased, the processes and IT applications used to … Read More
Improve inventory decisions: analyse your Supply Chains
What decisions are made. Senior people in government and business can make edicts and statements about financial matters without any factual basis. It is others that have to work within the meaningless constraints or recover from the unintended consequences. This week, the head of Australian Treasury made a statement that expenditure by the federal government should not exceed 25 percent … Read More
Your customers will pay their accounts on time, maybe
Collecting the money. After all the work has been done to fulfil the order, comes the wait until the customer pays the account. But what if the customer does not pay? This is the situation for suppliers to a large metals processor in Australia – it has gone into voluntary administration with debts of $A70m. The challenge is that the … Read More
Your supply chain strategy needs a logistics plan
Logistics plan elements. To develop your supply chain strategy, three strategic plans are required; one each for Procurement, Conversion and Logistics. Using the business model from my previous blog the Logistics strategic plan can be considered within five elements shown in the diagram: Customer service – the appropriate level of service for customers, by product group or segment, considering: order fulfilment … Read More
A strategic Supply Chain model for your organisation
No supply chain view in your business strategy. Does your organisation have a strategic business plan that incorporates the supply network? If the answer is no it is not surprising, because few companies have a strategic plan that includes this critical part of the business. The reasons often put forward are: The three elements that should be the core of … Read More