Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Most Often Overlooked Risk in Your Energy Supply Chain?

Is it the grid and the possibility of another great blackout (due to a lack of breakers)?

Is it the unpredictable terrorist act that could blow up a pipeline in North America (which includes friendly Canada)?

No, it’s Sciurus Carolinensis!

One little squirrel in one little circuit-breaker in one little substation can knock out power to 9,000 homes with a single nibble, as FirstEnergy customers in North Royalton found out on Tuesday.

Maybe Dark Verne has the right idea when he thinks we need to Get Rid of that Squirrel!.

Have yourself a Mathematically Correct Breakfast?

Have you ever wanted a mathematically correct breakfast? Well, thanks to George W. Hart, now you can (have one)!

Check out this great page on how to slice a bagel into two linked halves. (Now, if you’re not watching your weight, it will also work on a properly proportioned old-fashioned donut, but I strongly recommend the bagel.)

Hat-Tip to Matthieu Cormier, of Cocoa Mondo, a fellow Haligonian.

Do You Have Your Biggest Supply Chain Risk Covered?

If you said “yes“, think again! I know for a fact that the odds of you having your biggest supply chain risk covered are so statistically insignificant that they are effectively zero. Why? Because I cover supply chain technology, and it’s current reach. And despite the best efforts of myself, and a few other individuals who have been pounding away at the keys for years, most of the technology that you really need hasn’t yet permeated your four walls (or your ceiling or your floor for that matter).

You see, your biggest risk is not market shifts, natural disasters, or political turmoil — it’s your platform. The platform that your people rely on day-in and day-out to do their jobs … and if it doesn’t give you the visibility you need, you’ll never know which risks you have, which risks you have mitigated, or which risk just appeared that is about to wipe-out a third of your operations if you don’t act fast and mitigate it.

So check out my two-part series that ran last week on @Risk and 2Sustain, because when I say don’t ignore your platform risk because sustainability is an internal concern as well, I mean it!

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The Role of Optimization in Strategic Sourcing – The Future of Optimization

This series discusses the recent report from CAPS Research on the role of optimization in strategic sourcing. The primary goal is to highlight, clarify, and, in some cases, correct parts of the report that are important, confusing, or incorrect to insure that you have the best introduction to strategic sourcing decision optimization that one can have.

What will the future hold? The authors predict development in the following two directions:

  1. more self-serve applications that require no third-party involvement
  2. more powerful services that handle even larger, more complex problems

In other words, the same-old same-old for the foreseeable future. I’m sad to say I have to agree. Until strategic sourcing decision optimization catches on, most of the current providers are not going to make significant investments exploring new vistas for a solution that the majority of their customers aren’t even coming close to stressing out today. You see, current applications are just “scratching the surface” of potential uses. Optimization is very powerful and could ultimately be used to optimize the entire supply chain.

However, the applications will continue to get more user-friendly and easier on the self-service front as providers get exposed to even wider ranges of models and uses and refine their interfaces to support even more possibilities (while simplifying the definition of the average model). So this is something to look forward to.

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Effective Policy Deployment Process

As per this recent article in Industry Week on planning an effective policy deployment process, there is a difference between a strategic plan and strategy deployment. While a strategic plan is a three- to five-year vision of where you want an organization to be, strategy deployment is the one-year plan or process instituted to break down that vision into short-term goals that can be assigned, measured, provided with resources, and revisited to determine progress.

While short, it was an important article because many supply chain process improvements fail due to poor execution, which boils down to a failure to not only manage the change, but break the change down into manageable chunks that can be assigned, measured, provided with resources, and implemented in reasonably short time periods to demonstrate progress and interim success before enthusiasm for the initiative wears off.

In other words, the key to effective policy deployment is in the details. A long term vision is important, but so is a manageable path to get there that takes into account the timeframe that will be required which, as per Bob’s recent article on Procurement and Supply Chain Transformation: How Fast, will generally take a good 18 to 36 months.