Setting service levels usually starts with inventory.
Here’s a way to improve supply for important customers, that doesn’t involve inventory sizing.
And it doesn’t involve production either…
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Continue ReadingDemand Planning and Analytics
Setting Customer Service Levels… Without Managing Stock Levels
on January 17, 2012
Sort Out Your Customer Orders
on October 20, 2011
In times of shortage, how do you allocate inventory to customer orders?
It is tempting to fall back on hard allocation. This could be a mistake.
Here’s why. With a download simulation to prove it.
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Continue ReadingFive Things You Need To Know About Forecasting
on October 9, 2011
Here are five things you need to know about forecasting.
This is a statistics-free zone. Five forecasting principles for demand planning.
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Continue ReadingHere’s An Excel Method That Every Planner Should Know
on September 26, 2011
This is a core method to apply the Fast Excel Development Method in building a planning and scheduling system in Excel.
Convert forecasts, explode demand and generate work orders — this method is something that every planner should know.
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Continue ReadingA Two-Letter Word Will Change The Way You Look At Scheduling
on September 19, 2011
Is the purpose of production scheduling to feed MRP and execution?
If you’re satisfied with this answer, then you’re missing something. A small, two-letter word will change the way you look at scheduling.
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Continue ReadingHow To Plan for Long Lead-Time Materials
on July 27, 2011
The biggest headache in material planning is long lead-time materials.
Here is a simple tool that gives visibility between a buyer and a factory separated by a lot of water.
Also see an easy trick to connect multiple Excel users on different continents with free data integration over the cloud.
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Predictive planning provides a way to manage uncertainty. Planning can resolve the dilemma between schedule-push and demand-pull.
How an Excel-based predictive planning tool can work alongside the business transaction system.
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Analytics for demand planning in Excel usually involves big tables of data.
To understand the demand for a product, you need to look into its history. An order history can easily have 100K+ records.
Here is a technique to perform fast analytical formulas on many thousand rows.
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The dilemma of demand planning: to use a forecast or history.
We cannot expect history to repeat itself, yet every day we are reminded of inaccuracy and bias in the forecast.
How to combine the forecast and history to get a true measure of demand.
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