“Chaos, complexity, and uncertainty” often victimize an organization’s supply chain outstripping the ability of spreadsheet-based tools to respond intelligently. Sounds like 2020? In fact, this comes from one of the original Jedi Knights Dr. Harlan Crowder in a 1997 paper titled “Helpful Hints for OR/MS Consultants”. The purpose of this blog is to revisit this paper since the hints for success are as relevant now as they were then.

The purpose of a vision in this journey is to create a focus on the implementation of decision technology as tools to overcome inherent organizational cognitive limitations of bounded rationality and uncertainty bias to improve SCM. This blog provides some critical lessons to protect a firm’s investment in technology.

Digital Transformation is a popular term being used in today’s supply chain world. This can mean different things for your organization based on your company’s maturity. In this blog, you will learn the five key points to consider in a supply chain transformation journey.

What's the difference between mean absolute deviation and standard deviation for a uniform distribution for product data? Follow these formulas to find out.

When and how to invest in supply chain management technology is a critical question for all firms that is not a one-time question, but ongoing...

When and how to invest in supply chain management technology is a critical question for all firms that is not a one-time question but ongoing. This blog will observe the real business value is “survival and responsiveness” and elaborate on the challenges with this evaluation.

The right technology can provide a solution to maintaining optimal supply chain planning, but how can you justify the investment? 

A colleague and I were talking recently, and the conversation turned to what is the relationship between Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) and the Standard Deviation (STDEV). In this post, I will explain to you the math behind that approximation, which by the way, only applies to normal distributions.

Over the past few years, the chatter about the role of AI to “optimize” supply chain has been almost endless. Some of the material is great, other is hype, some conjecture, and in most cases, we will not know the impact...

If you are thinking “machine learning and AI” will save you from data disasters – think again as the pandemic behavior is playing havoc with machine learning models.

An often-heard theme in supply chain management (SCM) and COVID-19 is “data-driven” – being data-driven is the path to success. For COVID-19 “science-driven” is often said in the same sentence. For SCM demand or customer-driven replaces “science”. This blog will point out a few examples in the COVID-19 challenge demonstrating COVID-19 is an OM challenge.

Arguably the two most important core components of managing the supply chain or demand-supply network are demand management (DM) and Central Planning (CP). CP is sometimes referred to as master planning or supply planning.