Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Insufficient Sleep is a Public Health Epidemic – Don’t Let Your Supply Chain Give You Insomnia!

As per this feature on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic, which shouldn’t be surprising given that over one third of the US adult population gets less than 7 hours of sleep a night, when the average adult needs 7 to 9 hours a night. (Source: National Sleep Foundation)

Why? There’s a plethora of reasons. Overwork. Stress. Late Night Talk Show Addictions. Facebook and Twitter Addictions. And Insomnia. However, Supply Chain Insomnia should not be a reason.

According to this ridiculous article (on causes of supply chain insomnia identified) over on Supply Chain Digital, the following 10 issues are keeping supply chain leaders up at night and giving them insomnia:

  1. Collaboration
  2. Inventory Management and Planning
  3. Demand Management and Forecasting
  4. Supply Chain Network Optimization
  5. Supply Chain Risk Management
  6. Training and Development
  7. Sales and Operations Planning
  8. Material Purchase Price Reductions
  9. Performance improvements in warehouses and RDC’s
  10. Supply Chain Segmentation

There’s no excuse for any of these issues to be keeping you up at night. There have existed great Best-of-Breed technology solutions that have enabled an organization to solve the following issues for years, many of which have been profiled on this blog:

  • Collaboration
  • Inventory Management and Planning
  • Demand Management and Forecasting
  • Supply Chain Network Optimization
  • Sales and Operations Planning

The following can be appropriately addressed with the right mix of talent, process transition, and technology:

  • Supply Chain Risk Management
  • Performance improvements in warehouses and RDC’s
  • Supply Chain Segmentation

And the following is easily solved by actually putting money back into the training budget and letting your people go on courses, instead of taking money out of the training budget to increase CXO pay while working your talent half to death:

  • Training and Development

Which leaves only one issue to worry about:

  • Material purchase price reductions

But when you get right down to it, we’re in inflationary times and everyone knows it. Prices are going to go up and people are going to grudgingly pay reasonable, minimal, price increases. So the issue is not price reductions, but cost containment, and this is easily accomplished with

  • market intelligence and an understanding of what the real price currently is,
  • process improvement that takes price out of raw material acquisition, product production, and logistics, and
  • creative re-design that reduces the need for costly raw materials and production processes.

And all of this can be accomplished if you have the right talent with the right training. So invest in your talent*, give them the right technological tools, and let them transition your processes to where they need to be. Then you won’t have to worry about any of these problems.

*It’s not like the 95% investment in the top 1% has done any good! (Source: UC Berkeley Study)

Why Aren’t We Dealing With Extra-Planetary Supply Management on a Daily Basis? Part II

Why not? Lack of funding and focus.

It’s going to be expensive, but we have the money. Even if it costs ten times as much to put a man on Mars as it did to put a man on the moon, that’s only 4 Trillion. The annual GDP of the US is close to 16 Trillion. If the goal was to reach Mars in 10 years, that’s 160 Trillion, and only 2.5% of GDP would be required annually. The US definitely can afford this. Right now, the US is pouring its money into its military at a rate that is unfathomable given that it has not been attacked in a declared act of war on its own soil since Pearl Harbour. The US is spending close to 18% of its budget on military efforts, compared to China which is spending less than 2% of its budget on military efforts and which still has the second largest military expenditure in the world. the doctor will concede that the US has other problems to fix, and the military budget should probably be reduced by more than 2.5% so that those problems can be fixed as well, but there’s no reason that 2.5% couldn’t be redirected to this effort, especially considering it could still be considered military expenditure and employ just as many (if not more) people. This could still be a win for the US that likes it’s military, and appears to like deploying its military given the number of wars its been involved in since WWII. Furthermore, when you consider the dangerous nature of going first, the US probably wouldn’t want to send anyone but its best and brightest. And if we’re not alone, and we advance our technology to the point where inter-stellar travel becomes possible, we might attract the attention of an aggressive alien race and need the ability to defend ourselves. (Which would give the US an excuse to try and democratize space!) It would be a win for the US any way you want to look at it.

But the US isn’t the only country to blame. China, the world’s oldest culture, wants to regain its glory as the dominant empire (even though it’s been centuries since it could make that claim). As the world’s second largest economy, with a GDP exceeding 8 Trillion, and the fifth country to launch a satellite back in 1970, it should be making more efforts to establish itself as a dominant player in space, and focussing more on Mars. A target of 2040 – 2060 for a crewed mission to Mars is just too far off. If China dedicated itself to this goal, it could spark a new space race (as the US would want to be in the lead), which is just what we need to advance not only our space exploration ability, but mankind as a whole.

In addition, if one considers these big, mostly non-political, problems facing the US right now:

  • High Unemployment, partially due to a
  • Continual Decline in Manufacturing Jobs and Expertise, another impending
  • Housing Crisis,
  • Privacy Issues, the never-ending
  • Drug War and,
  • Unfunded Liabilities, partially due to the
  • Collapsing Dollar.

And if one considers these big, mostly non-political, problems facing China right now:

  • the need to maintain an appearance of success and save face,
  • 1.3 Billion citizens to keep happy and 930 Million to keep employed,
  • population growth that can’t be adequately managed by the one-child policy,
  • factories that need to run and products that need to be consumed, and
  • corruption and the age-old tradition of bribery.

And if one goes on to examine the root causes of these problems, one will find that many of them could likely be significantly addressed, if not solved, by a space race to Mars. How so? Come back next Sunday for Part III!

Why Should You Go Paperless? Paper is Very Expensive!

Hackett just released the first report in their new Category Insight Report series from their “Procurement Advisory Service” on “Commercial Print”. What did Hackett find? First of all, it found that the Commercial Print (CP) industry is shrinking in the US due to a shift toward digital-based solutions, which is in line with what we would expect as on-line advertising has been increasing. However, surprisingly, the global market is expected to grow at a 2.8% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) between 2011 and 2016, primarily as a result of expected growth in Asia-Pacific.

Thirdly, it found that the most significant costs are raw materials, which we would also expect. However, we might not expect that raw materials, and paper and ink in particular, account for nearly 60% of Commercial Printing Cost! In comparison, labour, averaging at 27%, is less than half of the cost. Thus, if you go digital, as the layout costs are probably similar, you can save 60% of the costs and spend that money on value-generating creative activities instead!

In addition, the report also highlighted that while paper accounts for approximately 50% of the costs in Asia-Pacific (AP) and Europe, ink accounts for about 44% of the costs in the United States. This is because printer ink, in the US, can cost over $5,000 a gallon, making it at least 25 times as expensive as a pint of blood (based on the average amount a hospital has to pay a provider to guarantee a tested, safe supply), and because the manufacturers design printers to reject cartridges when they are nearly, but not yet, empty. It’s ridiculous. Based on the average costs in Europe and Asia-Pacific, the cost of ink is 10 (ten) times what it should be — and it’s doing environmental damage to boot! (Because manufacturers make their money on the ink, they are making low-quality disposable printers that just end up in landfills when the drum nears the end of its useful life or it’s cheaper to buy a new printer on sale with a half-cartridge than buy a new cartridge.)

It also had a few surprising insights. For example, it found that the CP industry is experiencing a shift towards low-cost country sourcing. Traditionally, most companies printed at home, using either the printer preferred by their advertising firm or the local printer that gave them the best price, because quality control was vital (and transportation costs for paper can be high). But the internet makes project management and quality control possible from anywhere, and costs in countries (without the ink monopoly) can be significantly cheaper, especially if they are close by (like Poland, Slovenia, and Turkey are for European countries).

It also had some great insights into the dynamics of the industry, with a medium threat of potential entrants to existing suppliers (fighting for a low-growth or dwindling market), a medium to high threat of substitutes (as buyers go electronic), a high rivalry, and strong bargaining power on the buyer-side. For complete details, check out the Commercial Print report, which, like future reports in the series, in addition to the category overview and key market trends, addresses:

  • the cost structure in detail,
  • the competitive landscape and key industry players,
  • category tools,
  • the sourcing and procurement Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for the category,
  • category best practices, and
  • optimal channel design(s).

Hackett isn’t the first group to offer Category-Specific Market Intelligence, and players like the Denali Group and Mintec, have been offering it for a while, but it is one of the few research firms that have the expertise to deliver industry-leading category-specific market intelligence. If you’re already a Hackett client, and you need category-specific market intelligence, it’s probably the product you need. If you’re not a Hackett client, but need category-specific market intelligence, be sure to put Hackett on you’re shortlist!

Why Aren’t We Dealing With Extra-Planetary Supply Management on a Daily Basis?

It’s a fair question, considering that we put a man on the moon forty-four years ago and fifty years ago General Dynamics promised us we’d be on Mars by now (see this post).

It’s not an easy question, given the challenges involved, but the doctor thinks he has the answer. But first, consider the following:

1) Putting a man on the moon cost 400 Billion in 1969 terms. (Source: “The Cost of the Moon Race” on asi.org) That was roughly 9% of the US GDP in 1969. However, the effort really started in 1959 with Project Mercury, which had the goal of a manned earth orbit. In other words, the US put a man on the moon in 10 years using only 1% of GDP. NASA’s annual budget today is about 18 Billion, which is about 0.1% of GDP, or roughly 1/10th of what they were getting when the race to the moon was on. (With respect to the Federal Budget, in 1966 they had 4.41%. This year, they have less than 0.5%.)

2) Current robotic missions to Mars take about 8 months. Improvements in technology could probably shave a few months off of that. However, given that the orbits of Earth and Mars around the sun allow for opportunity’s to embark and return roughly every 26 months, even if the trip were shortened, it would just mean more time on Mars as one would want to minimize trip distances to ensure enough fuel. So that means over two years in space. Given that a Russian cosmonaut spent 1.2 years in the International Space Station, it’s obvious that humans could train, and endure, a mission of that length.

3) Damage from asteroids is a big concern, as they have an average orbital speed of 25 kilometers per second and we know of asteroids with orbital velocities of over 30 kilometres per second, or almost three times the estimated speed of the rocket. Large ones will be detected long before they reach the ship and enable it to make course corrections. Smaller ones could pose a problem.

However, we have the technologies to produce titanium-based metal alloys up to four times as strong as steel, exceeding 2 GPa, carbon fibres that approach 6 GPa, and lonsdaleite, an allotrope of carbon with a hexagonal lattice that is commonly called a hexagonal diamond, but which is 58% harder than diamond and able to resist pressures of 152 GPa (GigaPascals), which is a pressure that is roughly equal to 1.5 Million times atmospheric pressure. Given that standard atmospheric pressure is roughly 14.7 psi (Pounds per Square Inch), lonsdaleite can withstand an impact of up to 22 Million psi! That means we can make mighty strong spacecraft.

In other words, it’s not a question of money, trip duration, or the ability to create a space ship that can safely withstand the dangers of intra-solar system travel. So why aren’t we dealing with extra-planetary supply management on a daily basis?

Come back next Sunday for Part II and the answer.

One of These Things Is Not Like The Other

One of these things is not like the other
One of these things is not the same

One of these things will be straight and honest
One of these things won’t bring us shame

One of these things will stand by his actions
One of these things won’t focus on blame

One of these things will not hide his intent
One of these things won’t play a game

One of these things will appease the public
One of these things will not inflame

One of these things could make us quite happy
Because
One of these things is not the same

P.S. This post is for Nova Scotians.