Sunday, September 25, 2011 at 4:50PM We have posted our Supply Chain Physics webinar series as well as our most recently delivered S&OP: Closing the Gap Between People and Processes on our web-site.
All of these videos are available without registration and can be found here. We hope you enjoy them.
Monday, September 19, 2011 at 10:13PM We are pleased to announce two significant enhancements to DemandCaster.
Over the weekend we upgraded our servers to improve the performance of DemandCaster. We have added faster processor speeds and increased the memory. We have done this in an effort to maintain and improve the overall DemandCaster user experience. Over the coming weeks we will be introducing further enhancements to improve the responsive of our many user interfaces.
We have also started populating our knowledge base with DemandCaster “How To” articles and general information. This is important because much of this information was previously located in the workbooks and other documents we used for training. Admittedly, we were unsure how best to share these articles. Our customers were accustomed to giving us a call or sending an email to ask a question. Though we welcomed this type of personal service, we realized that many of our customers would also appreciate the ability to answer their questions in a self service manner. As a result, we have begun to publish these articles directly to our support site.
For our DemandCaster users, we have integrated access to these articles from within DemandCaster. You can read how to directly access the help desk articles and initiate support tickets from within DemandCaster in this knowledge base posting.
We have also decided to make our knowledge base articles available to the public to allow everyone to read how DemandCaster operates. We are not afraid to share our approach because even though our customers love our technology, they love our service more. It is what our clients value most about DemandCaster and Cadent Resources.
We hope you will find these two enhancement of value. As always, please do not hesitate to let us know your questions, comments, or concerns
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 5:18PM It is Back-to-School sale time. There are advertisements for the office superstores and the big box retailers. The goods that line the shelves, end aisle displays, and floor displays were ordered back in April and May. The goods were shipped in May from Asia and June for the goods still produced in the United States. Back then we were still in the belief that we were still in a recovery.
On August 12, it was reported that July retail sales (excluding autos) were up 8.5% from July 2010 but essentially flat from the June results. On the same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that economists that they have surveyed predicted that August sales would be the second month in a row with flat sales performance. The title of the WSJ article was “Heading Back to School, But not to the Stores” which basically sums it all up.
On August 16th, there is an article from the AP that Wal-Mart and Home Depot are upgrading their profit outlooks for this year. As we have pointed out in this blog, The Great Recession forced many companies to lean up. They have had to tighten up their planning and inventory management. They have learned to operate with less employees and adjusted the product offering and mix to cater to more and more value conscious consumers.
Retailers also have learned from 2008 when they wound up with piles of unsold merchandise that they had to discount up to 80 percent or sell to liquidators for pennies on the dollar. Some of their peers, including Circuit City, shuttered. In fact, several retailers that have survived the Great Recession by cutting costs, keeping inventories lean and pushing either low prices or high quality are reflecting confidence going forward.
Basically, with flat sales Wal Mart, Home Depot, and others are able to improve their profit outlook on flat sales.
Are you able to do the same?
The key is to tightly manage planning, inventory, and personnel. Things our clients have been doing since the start of The Great Recession. Any business that has survived The Great Recession has probably done this to some degree.
We believe that this is a never ending activity. An important part of the Lean philosophy is Continuous Improvement. Planning parameters and inventory levels must be constantly challenged, tweaked, and updated to allow your business to operate in its most efficient state. Even if your business is not retail, evaluating your product offering is must be done with equal vigor. Lastly, and unfortunately for the economy at large, employment must be tightly managed at well. We are seeing an increase in hiring freezes and outsourcing of support functions.
Sound planning and optimized inventory can be achieved. With a tool like DemandCaster and our process, this can be achieved in less time and with less people than you might think.
What are your current planning and inventory challenges? Post them here or send us an email, we would love to discuss your challenges and suggest opportunities for improvement.
Working effectively and efficiently, we will persevere!
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:54AM With the proliferation of items or SKUs and the global nature of many of our supply chains, it is imperative to have the best and most accurate Sales Plan we can have. It is equally important to have an Operations or Supply Plan to ensure that the Sales Plan can be supported. As a result, we have seen Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) become a very popular tool in today’s fast paced business environment.
There are countless books that outline the S&OP process. There are numerous software packages that will assist in the data management, forecasting, and rough cut capacity plan development to facilitate the S&OP process. The software offerings range from very low cost spreadsheet macros to modules of the best known ERP systems on the market today.
The S&OP process is well known and available to everyone. Software to support the process and manage the large amounts of data are also available to suit almost any size business and budget. Yet, S&OP is not universally successful even though the process is sound from a Technical standpoint.
Why is this?
If it were as easy as just “putting in” the process and getting a software package to help, why are there entire conferences and seminars dedicated to S&OP?
We have found in our practice, that simply getting the process steps and appropriate software is not enough. We are firm believers that when S&OP fails it is because the people part of the process is too often ignored. We call this the Socio part of the process.
S&OP requires a consensus Demand Plan. This is the cornerstone of a good S&OP process. A consensus Demand Plan is contingent on all functions in the business to agree. This means that Marketing, Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, and General Management all must agree on the Demand Plan.
It is not easy to get all these functions to agree and cooperate. Yet, to make S&OP deliver on its promise, the level of cooperation and agreement has to be quite high.
All complicated business processes have both a Socio and Technical piece. For the process to operate effectively and efficiently, both parts of the process need to be well designed and managed.
We at Cadent Resources, Inc. are introducing a webinar that will introduce the concept of Socio-Tech systems and how it applies to the S&OP business process.
We would love to have you join us and share your experiences. Click here for more information. If you feel there is anything you would like to see added to this webinar, please let us know.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 11:26PM In his July 4th New York Times OpEd piece, David Brooks wrote an otherwise interesting opinion on the G.O.P. tactics during this latest budget debate. One point he referenced as an economic concern, however, troubled me:
“Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises…”
What does that mean? Is it bad? Well, it would only be bad if both employment and productivity went down.
In the June 14 posting of the blog Carpe Diem, Mark Perry provided a great analysis on the reality of domestic production. Mr. Perry wrote:
“We are constantly hammered with bad news about the decline in the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., but we never hear the good news about why that is happening: Manufacturing workers in America keep getting more and more productive, which then allows us to produce more and more output over time, with fewer and fewer workers. That’s a great story about an American industry that is healthy, successful and thriving, and not an industry in decline.”
He also provided the graph I have shared below to illustrate the enormous productivity gains the US worker has been part of over the last number of decades.
Though domestic manufacturing is doing quite a bit better than in the past, by no means do I believe it is “thriving” as Mr. Perry asserts. It is just better positioned to meet the opportunities of a vastly different global economic landscape.
Manufacturing more than most industries has changed for the better because it had to. Through a combination of lean manufacturing and the adoption of high tech machinery and software, domestic manufacturing has been able to sustain itself during the dark “outsourcing” movement of the last 20 plus years.
As production flowed overseas, domestic manufacturers had to face the reality of lowering their operating costs or die. Re-engineering and lean manufacturing became the business process initiatives necessary to drive productivity in otherwise cash starved enterprises. When the change process used to become especially challenging I remember saying to the companies we worked with:
“One day the cost of labor in China will become too costly and work will start flowing back to the US. Those that become lean and survive will be positioned to meet this opportunity head on. Work to be one of those companies.”
This is the power of the free market. Industries left tethered to some counter productive incentive often become bloated because there is no reason to change. Manufacturing on the large part were left un-tethered and had no choice but to change. Those that survived are now in a better place.
So back to Mr. Brooks comment. Manufacturing employment has catered because it had to in order to meet the real competitive pressures of off shoring. In order to survive they had to become more productive and productivity either meant producing more with the same or producing the same with less. This is a good thing!
Unfortunately, from a macro-economic stand point, this does not help the greater than 9% of unemployed workers left hanging. This is the employment challenge in the United States to which I have a few thoughts I would like to share in my next post.