mThink

After a quiet period of several years, merger and acquisition activity has gained momentum across many industry sectors in 2005. The interest in M&A activity never, of course, disappeared – and with good reason. Accenture research shows that high-performance businesses pursue growth strategies that juggle the short-term priorities of today and the organizational and competitive [...]

Mapping customer delivery requirements against the realities of supply chain capability is often an endless source of friction. Demand forecasts are constantly changing, customer needs are ever more specific, and service requirements are rising in every industry. Growing overseas sourcing makes seasonal fluctuations tougher and places greater stress on intra- and inter-organizational communications. Supply chain integration has long promised to smooth the wrinkles between sales and operations planning.

ASCET: You use the term “disruptive technologies” in your work. Can you define this term and talk about how the concept can be applied to supply chain? Clayton M. Christensen (CC): A disruption is an innovation that comes into a market that enables a whole new population of people who historically might not have had [...]

ASCET: What has changed in Crate and Barrel’s inventory management process since 4R and Crate and Barrel began working together? Ed Rennemann (ER): We had not changed our store replenishing process since 1984. Historically, we have given our store managers the visibility to see what was available in the DC along with rates of sale [...]

Growth is clearly back on the executive agenda. Yet executives increasingly find that growing profitably is extremely challenging due to the complexity and volatility characteristic of today’s business environment. Further complicating matters is the fact that, after several years of intense focus on cost reduction, most companies’ supply chains are operationally efficient but are not [...]

We may never see a television series about supply chains. However, nearly everyone is familiar with Survivor, where the best players develop fast-changing strategies to outdo competitors and persevere through shifting conditions. “Outwit, outplay, outlast” is the show’s motto. So perhaps Survivor can be viewed as a good model – a template, in fact – [...]

In today’s globally competitive world, operating efficiency is the primary focus of the corporate cost-minimization/profit-maximization equation. Many manufactured goods are becoming commodities as new substitutes emerge. Further, increases in speed and reliability in transportation, domestically and especially globally, allow for freer geographic distribution of manufacturing and warehouse facilities. Since the Industrial Revolution, supply chain management [...]

View The buzz surrounding radio frequency identification (RFID) is getting louder. Last week Wal-Mart announced that its initial use of radio-transmitting inventory tags has reduced out-of-stock merchandise by 16 percent at the company’s stores where those tags are in use. According to Linda Dillman, Wal-Mart’s chief information officer, the company is able to restock RFID-tagged [...]

The sales and operations planning (S&OP) process has been around for decades. I have discussed it in most of my presentations on demand planning and forecasting since the mid-1990s and have been polling audiences along the way. One-third of the early audiences were composed of individuals from companies that had implemented S&OP, while for recent [...]