Supply Chain Planning Garbage in Equals Garbage Out

Very interesting piece, which addresses a problem we often encountered, and was too often not addressed well enough.  Every enterprise should have a handle on cleansing and trends in data.  Read the whole thing for a solution view.

By Cheryl Wiebe,  Partner, Applied Analytics, Manufacturing at Teradata

Supply Chain Planning: Garbage In Garbage Out...
Lean manufacturing has been massively adopted over the last 10 years. Lean is driving attention to the notion of supply chain variability and accuracy of planning factors. Kanban, or pull style, says that the impetus for manufacturing activity (e.g., arrival of starting kit to begin assembly) is the arrival of the required materials at your station. This means if we have insufficient material to kit the line, the line goes down. 

What this means? Lean assumes your supply chain is infallible. This forces suppliers to plan JIT warehouses at the beginning of the line. A certain disk drive manufacturer (supplier A) had to supply 18,000 drives at the JIT warehouse nearby the customer's PC assembly plant, for example. If they dipped below 18k, the customer would not pull from supplier A, and would pull instead from supplier B, the competitor. This caused supplier A to ensure they always had 25k drives (excess inventory). A short on inventory from suppliers will bring down a Lean manufacturing line. The supply problem has now moved into the JIT warehouse. We have moved the problem upstream. ... " 

Merck and Innovation

3 ways Merck is shaking up its innovation programs

'... Like most pharmaceutical companies, Merck has struggled in recent years with regulatory pressures and new technologies. To stay competitive, the firm is seeking to implement a "lean-startup software ethic" while establishing repeatable processes that can keep new ideas flowing. "Change and innovation are choices, not givens, in any organization, and there are managerial levers for making these selections wisely," write Frank Cespedes, Jay Galeota and Michael Wong ... "

HBS launches HBX, Learns Online Collaboration

What Harvard Business School Has Learned About Online Collaboration From HBX
In June 2014, Harvard Business School launched HBX, its new online education initiative. At the time, the norm, increasingly, in many online courses was to create a “lean back”, individualized experience where students would primarily watch streamed video lectures that centered on experts. Stimulating lectures with star professors, perhaps, but lectures nonetheless — with a passive, individualized learner experience. We wanted to change that.  ... " 

Fast Track Back to Kanban

It has been a considerable time since I have worked with Kanban, the lean,  just in time manufacturing process.   This InfoQ piece outlines what it is and a workshop that addresses how to achieve it.  Even including a Kanban game to teach the concepts.

" ... So you are considering getting started with Kanban, but where do you start? In this article we describe the approach we used in Danske Bank to get teams off to a good start with Kanban. You are free to use the material and content to get started yourself and the purpose of the article is to explain the what and how of the workshop to enable you to use it. .... " 

This also makes me think of electronic or e-Kanban, which has been integrated into corporate systems such as ERP.   I often thought of Kanban as 'activated' business process models.   Now with more data and better analytics, might we take e-Kanban further, analyzing the streams of data now created in the enterprise to create new kinds of Kanban intervention?   What might that look like?  Thoughts?

Future Software Will be Cognitive

Will the next generation of software be cognitive?  Good piece in Forrester.  I am a keen student of the reasons for the partial success and failures of AI as advisory systems in it's previous wave.  Plan to continue to watch the reports from Forrester and see how this links to our own and other cognitive efforts.

" ... In conclusion, although this is only the start of long series of research we will be writing in Forrester, I recommend developers to prepare to this new wave of technology and integrate it in their practices rather than isolate it out. One reason AI failed once was because it never got integrated into IT. Let’s avoid that mistake. I am hoping to post, based on what I saw at the forum, how cognitive computing impacts the way you develop, and it effects your SDLC similarly to how Agile and Lean do -- a good reason to keep doing what you are doing with Agile!.  In the meantime you should also read the take aways my colleague Michelle Goetz has summarized in her blog about this conference too. ... " 

Lean Innovation at Amazon

In Innovation Excellence:  Fascinating piece.  Reporting on a piece in the McKinsey Quarterly.    " ... The company’s information technology was always very good at understanding what the customer wanted and passing the right signal down. For example, the selection of the transportation method for a given package is driven, first, by the promised delivery date to the customer. Lower-cost options enter the equation only if they provide an equal probability of on-time delivery. That’s basically a Lean Principle  ... " 

Virtual Battlefield: Project Morpheus

I was struck by use of the term virtual battlefield.  See Bloomberg article.  This was precisely what we did now many years ago. With punch cards and mainframes, and also excellent-for-the-time, game style visualizations.   We seem to be ready to take the next step, by creating and augmenting the real world and then interacting with it.   See also Project Morpheus.

" .... Virtual reality has never quite materialized for most consumers. While movies such as Tron and The Matrix conjured immersive, action-packed renditions of computer-simulated environments, contemporary efforts to sell workable VR failed because the systems were expensive and required bulky headsets that left many players woozy and disoriented.

Now, after decades of false promises, virtual reality is starting to feel a lot more real. Much of the credit belongs to geekily named startup Oculus VR, whose ski goggles-like prototype, the Oculus Rift, has gamers spellbound with anticipation for its as-yet-undeclared release. At the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 19, Oculus unveiled a prototype that features a high-definition, organic, light-emitting diode screen with a nifty trick called positional tracking. When users lean forward while wearing the headset, they also lean forward in the virtual world and see their surroundings from a different vantage point. “People want to experience the impossible,” says Palmer Luckey, Oculus’s 21-year-old founder. “Virtual reality is the ultimate conclusion of that human desire.” ...  '

Diagrams to Represent Competitors

New way to create infographics about your competitors.  The well known petal diagram.   " ....   The Petal Diagram drives your business model canvas ... What the chart is saying is, “we think our customers will come from these markets.”  That’s handy if you’re using a Lean Startup methodology because the Petal Chart helps you identify your first potential customer segments on the business model canvas. ... ".  

Learning Innovation Entrepreneurship

In Innovation Excellence: Successful Innovative Entrepreneurship is Seldom Learnt at Business School. Quite true.  Its more like being agile, using tacit and dynamic knowledge.  It might be learn able in the right kind of internship or with personal experiences.  Innovation centers are a means of producing the right contexts.  But that alone is not enough.    Late in the article the author talks about a simulation game they produced, which I would like to see in more detail.  I find this kind of gamification can work in the right context and culture.

 " ... At ImagineNation™, we have developed The Start-Up Game™ to help academic institutions and corporations close the gap between teaching innovation and entrepreneurship and learning how to “do” and “be” an innovative entrepreneur. The Start-Up Game™ is a gamified business simulation that is part of a customized organizational learning process that brings the lean start-up process “to life” and develops innovative leadership and start-up entrepreneurship motivation, mindsets, behaviors and skills to create ... " 

Gary Cokins on EPM Analytics

A piece that overviews some of Gary Cokin's view on analytics.  Have  read and passed a few of his columns.  Well done.  He talks about Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), not a term we used:  " ... Think of EPM as an umbrella concept. EPM integrates operational and financial information into a single decision support and planning framework. These methods include strategy mapping, balanced scorecards and dashboards, customer profitability analysis (using activity-based costing principles), forecasting, driver-based budgeting with rolling financial projections, and resource capacity requirements planning. Most of these methods have been in existence for decades, and many even before there were computers. What makes them relevant now is the need to integrate them for faster decisions to more complex problems and opportunities. The EPM methods in turn fuel other core solutions, such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, risk management, and human capital management systems, as well as lean management and the Six Sigma initiatives. It is quite a stew, but they all blend together. Embedding analytics of all flavors into EPM methods – such as correlation, clustering and segmentation analysis – enriches each of EPM’s many methods. .... " 

Lean Logistics in the Supply Chain

Topic: Lean Logistics in the Supply Chain
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Time: 8:30 AM - 2 PM
Location: LeanCor Supply Chain Group HQ, 7660 Turfway Road, Suite 200 Florence, KY 41042
Event Weblink: http://www.business.uc.edu/supply-chain
Please attend / help advertise this event, as appropriate. Thanks!
Registration fee is 50$, and registration may be completed online via UC Conference & Event

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

(You will have to first set up an account with UC Conference & Event Services to register; FYI, the registration website URL is http://cincinnatiuniv-web.ungerboeck.com/reg/reg_p1_form.aspx?oc=10&ct=WEBREG&eventid=5237.)
For more information, contact Tricia Burger, tricia.burger@uc.edu, (513) 556-7140. Further details are provided below and in the attached pdf file, also available online at
http://business.uc.edu/content/dam/business/departments/oba/docs/2013supplychainevent.pdf.

Event description:
Lean systems thinking and tools have maximized customer value and minimized waste, while focusing on continuous improvement. Supply chains have fostered unprecedented integration and collaboration along with globalization and specialization. Logistics, spanning material flow aspects of transportation and warehousing, has seen sustained popularity. Despite the attention drawn to each of these areas, their effective combination into Lean Supply Chain Logistics still leaves many avenues for improvement.

Join us to learn about the theory behind lean and to see firsthand how lean principles are applied to logistics and supply chain processes. This workshop will highlight the critical elements and "must know" concepts, and discuss the tools necessary to solve problems, eliminate waste, decrease inventory and lead time, improve processes, and ultimately decrease the total cost of fulfillment.

Experts, Mr. Robert Martichenko (CEO, LeanCor Supply Chain Group) and Dr. Thomas Goldsby (Professor, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University), will lead this discussion. Participants will gain experience with Lean Supply Chain practices via tours of LeanCor’s operations & lean fulfillment centers.

The event will be held April 30, 2013, 8:30AM – 2:00PM at LeanCor Supply Chain Group’s Headquarters, 7660 Turfway Road, Suite 200, Florence, KY (transportation will be provided to LeanCor’s Lean Fulfillment Center). Seats are very limited and registration is required. The fee to register for this half-day event is $50. Pre-registrants, as of April 23, 2013, will receive Mr. Martichenko’s book, PEOPLE: A leader's day-to-day guide to building, managing and sustaining lean organizations. ... 

KC to Market in a Digital World

About how Kimberly Clark plans to market in a digital world.  Semantics or a key subtlety?
" .. Spurring growth for such brands as Huggies, Cottonelle and Scott remains a priority. Mr. Sirkin will also concentrate on K-C's "lean marketing" initiative. Though several packaged-goods marketers have talked in recent weeks about digital media as a driver of cost-efficiency, it's not the key, he said. 

"It's very easy for people to translate 'lean' into low-cost provider or cheapest," Mr. Sirkin said. "That's not the exercise. Lean is effectiveness and greater return on investment. The other thing is we don't believe in digital marketing. We believe in marketing in a digital world, and there's a huge difference." .. ' 

What Works in Emerging Technology

Of Interest  (requires registration) Reading now.    This has always been a primary focus of mine.  We were largely successful in filtering out the not immediately useful.
" ... TDWI's What Works in Emerging  Technologies offers more than 30 pages of fresh, topically focused  customer success stories and expert perspectives designed to enhance your  understanding of the tools, technologies, and methods that are central to  today's emerging technologies in data integration, data warehousing, and  business intelligence.

Download What Works now!

TOPICS COVERED
Analytic Databases
Collaborative/Agile/Lean Data Integration
Columnar Databases
Data Governance
Data Warehousing Appliances
Mobile Business Intelligence
Real-Time Data Integration
Software-as-a-Service
Unified Data Integration Platforms ... "

Risk Mangement and Lean Six-Sigma

IEEE article :   " ...For engineers involved with quality, it is a natural evolution to incorporate risk management in their work. There is an increased awareness regarding risk management: even if the quality compliance is very high, one gap in risk management could have dramatic impacts. Any process has to be effective, efficient, well measured and monitored for key performance indicators and key risk indicators. All the interdependencies between processes within work systems have to be assessed and the risk mitigated.

The shift from quality to risk management is a “must” in this VUCA world. The engineers who recognize this fact and expand their skills to incorporate risk management will be very well positioned in the job market for many years to come ..."

Industrial Engineering of Business Services

The term ' Industrial Engineering' struck me in an Ecommerce Times article. IE is part of my background, and I have seen it applied in many areas, even services.  So why not think about that application in more depth?  " ... The ability of the cloud to transform enterprises into business service factories is a change that mimics the maturation of other business aspects. Industrial engineering, lean manufacturing and just-in-time inventory follow roughly the same line as the modernization of IT. Now the question is how to attain IT transformation in order to leverage cloud computing ... " .

Personal Kanban

Jerry Michalski is hosting a conference talk on Monday January 4 at 1:30 PM EST. Dial-in Number: 1-270-400-1500 Participant Access Code: 778778 ... Its about ' ... Personal Kanban, a way of seeing your work's shape, cadence and flow, developed by his longtime friend Jim Benson. Inspired by kanban/lean/agile methods, PK is tuned to personal productivity (there's a team version we'll tackle later). To get the most from this call, open Jim's SlideShare presentation.... '

Shopper Path to Purchase

ARF Chief Research Officer Joel Rubinson posts about shopper path to purchase:

' ... Understanding “Path to Purchase” will change marketing and media priorities. In most cases, it is likely to increase the budget for search, comparison shopping, and particularly in-store shopper marketing vs. using a media habits approach because those places don’t have a big share of media time but they are where the “lean-forward” action is. Shopper insights research shows that, for many products, 50% or more of purchases and brand choices are decided on right in the store. For such products, to put it in terms that media planners can relate to, shopper marketing is like recency on steroids ... '.

Also be sure to see the first comment on the post, where Dave Katz of ClientOne describes the solution that he has developed for exactly this kind of problem. Have pointed to this approach here before, it is worth another look.

Lean Inventory, Ideal Pricing with Strategic Shoppers

In Forbes, an article Outsmarting Smart Shoppers, analyzes a Knowledge@Wharton article: "Purchasing, Pricing and Quick Response in the Presence of Strategic Consumers", by Wharton Prof Gérard P. Cachon.

" ... there are the strategic consumers, who are willing to buy full price sometimes, but at other times they will wait for a bargain. According to new Wharton research, it's these customers that retailers need to focus on in order to reap the full benefits of lean retail inventory management and variable pricing ... The research shows that when strategic consumers are factored into a theoretical model, lean inventory--or so-called "quick response"--systems are, on average, 67% more profitable."Although it is well established in the literature that quick response provides value by allowing better matching of supply with demand, it provides more value, often substantially more value, by allowing a retailer to control the negative consequences of strategic behavior. Furthermore, this latter benefit can be substantial ... ".

Detailed abstract and full technical paper here.