Category Archives: Supply Chain

The 12 Days of X-emplification: Day 11 – Supply Chain Optimization

On Day 2 we talked about strategic sourcing decision optimization, the technology you need to make the right buy given the myriad of constraints you have to adhere to and the large number of costs and bids you need to take into account. Today we’re going to talk about supply chain optimization – the process of optimizing your supply chain, or distribution network, to minimize costs and maximize value.

Even though the only way to truly get the optimal buy every time is to use the optimal supply chain, the reality is that you can’t transform your supply chain overnight for every bid. The realities are that it takes time to acquire, lease, or dispose of distribution centers and warehouses, that you have contracts in place with suppliers and carriers for anywhere from three months to three years in a typical organization, and that changing global distribution patterns requires time to research the regulatory, documentation, and taxation requirements of different countries and trade zones. Thus, when it comes to strategic sourcing, the best you can do is optimize the buy within the supply chain you have available to you today. However, if you can improve the supply chain, then you can reduce your costs and save even more across all of your buys.

Supply chain optimization is something you should do on a regular basis. Whereas in the past, experts would say that it is something you should do only once every five, seven, or ten years – today it is something you should do every year! Today’s optimization solutions are a lot more powerful than they were ten years ago and allow you to build much more sophisticated models, which are now usually solved in hours compared to the weeks that was once required for models of this magnitude.

Even though it probably doesn’t make sense to buy and sell manufacturing and distribution center assets every year, there’s nothing stopping you from modeling the cost associated with such a sale, or modeling the cost of breaking or failing to renew a lease, of each asset you have if new options present themselves, such as alternative low-cost distribution centers or the possibility to sell a manufacturing center to an outsourced contract manufacturer who might be able to manage it more cost effectively. Today’s solutions can model all of the costs associated with acquiring, running, and disposing of an asset in your global distribution network, and can help you truly identify what the optimal network is for you at any given time for any given period of operation. (Thus, every year you can redo the analysis and assume that the network is only going to remain stable for the next year.) You can also tell a good supply chain network optimization solution that certain aspects of the network aren’t allowed to change and that certain aspects of the network must change and have it tell you whether or not your current network is optimal or if you should consider making some changes.

So how do you identify the right supply chain modeling and optimization solution? As with any other technology, you ask the right questions. The following questions should be enough to get you started and help you identify the real solutions with the power you need from the imposters.

1. Can the solution model your supply chain as is?

This is a question you need a resounding yes to. How do you know how much a potential network redesign is going to save you if you don’t even know how much your current network design is costing you? This brings us to …

2. Can it derive a cost baseline?

Once you’ve modeled your current network, the solution should be able to run the model and tell you how much your network should be costing you. (If your current network is actually costing you significantly more, than either you have some inefficiencies in your processes to work out or you have not accurately modeled your network and need to revise or expand your model.)

3. Can the solution support the construction of a model depicting a desired state?

If you have a solution in mind, you should be able to construct that solution and derive a cost baseline for that solution. Similarly, you should be able to define your own modification of a suggested network design and derive a cost baseline for that modification. After all, it’s not the lowest cost solution, it’s the highest value solution – and that’s not necessarily the solution with the lowest cost today, but the network design with the expected lowest cost, and highest value, over the expected lifetime of the network.

4. Can it derive an estimated cost of any model you specify under a projected range of activity?

The reality is that any given solution is only optimal for the specific (set of) demand value(s) and the specific (set of) cost(s) that the model is defined on. However, you’re optimizing your network for a future period of time, where demands are only forecasts that could change. Thus, you want a solution that also has simulation capabilities and the ability to run multiple models under multiple demand scenarios and cost differentials to allow you to come up with a network plan that is robust and most likely to save you money over the range of scenarios that are most likely to occur.

5. Can it allow you to drill down into the expected cost differential between two models and determine why?

It’s not enough to know that one network design is expected to cost 2M more than another, you also need to know why, especially if the more expensive network design is the one you’d prefer. If you know that most of the costs are associated with lease payments, then you know that if you could negotiate a lower lease price, you could end up with a network design that you like and that is only slightly more than the lowest cost solution. If such a design also has lower risks, then it has a higher value and you can choose it.

6. Can it help you optimize your supply chain improvement investments?

Converting from one network design to another will occur a lot of upfront costs associated with asset acquisition, lease, and disposal as well as penalties if you have contracts in place that you need to back out of early. These up front costs need to be covered somehow, and if you only have a fixed amount of capital available for supply chain improvements, you want the model to be able to take that into account and the solution to provide you with different, near-optimal, improvement possibilities that are within your budget today.

7. Can it model the impact of fixed asset disposal or cost reduction on projected service levels? inventories? greening?

When optimizing your network, it’s not just about cost and risk, it’s also about service optimization, inventory optimization, supply chain greening, and a slew of other initiatives. It’s important that such a solution not only allow you to specify all of your constraints, but allow you to calculate whether or not you’re trading service level or inventory risk or carbon credits for that cost reduction.

8. Can the solution support sensitivity analysis?

Building on the last question, if the system tells you a certain network design is likely to reduce your projected service levels by 1%, you want to know how much money is required to bring that down to any threshold between 0 and 1%. Maybe you only have to sacrifice 25% of your maximum savings opportunity to achieve a service level decrease of only 0.1%. That could be a good trade-off – a 0.1% decrease in projected service levels is much better than a 1% service level decrease, especially when it costs you only 25% of your maximum savings potential to achieve a projected service decrease that’s ten times better than the projected service decrease that you would be stuck with if you went with the greedy solution.

The Third Era of Supply Chain Transformation: The Everyday English Version

World Trade Magazine recently published an article by Dr. Sandor Boyson titled “Supply Chain Globalization: The Era of Revitalized Command is Upon Us” that wasn’t too bad, provided you could translate all of the academic-speak into everyday English. Since it’s slow reading for anyone not accustomed to such pretentious verbiage, and almost ten pages, I thought I’d summarize some of the more salient points.

It starts off by noting that the first era of supply chain globalization was the era of vertical integration, exemplified by the Ford Motor Company that organized its production and supply chain as a completely vertically integrated system in the 1920s. It owned the entire process: manufacturing and assembly plants, lumber camps, intermodal transportation assets, and even private airports. Its strategy was designed to ensure continuous availability and “the uninterrupted supply of raw materials of high quality free from market changes”.

The second era is defined as the era of virtualization that began in the late eighties and early nineties and consisted of a broad fabric of alliances for managing the entire value chain. Sun Microsystems exemplifies the virtual enterprise approach – it never touches 90% of the server computers it sells globally – rather, an outsourced Sun supply base receives Sun customer order signals directly and ships the orders to the global customer base via outsourced third-party logistic carriers. Information technology and pervasive outsourcing have enabled the pooling of assets and capabilities into multi-enterprise virtual networks well beyond the formal/traditional boundaries of any single enterprise.

However, according to the article: We are approaching the end of this headlong plunge into supply chain virtualization and dispersion. While this business model has driven cost efficiencies and operational flexibility across global enterprises, it has also led to a heightened perception of eroded strategic command and control and a loss of network coherence at the level of the corporate senior executive suite.

Furthermore, the emerging emphasis is on corporate risk management. Enterprises are re-calibrating their globalization strategies and strengthening the core of their organizations as the risks of the over-extended and over-outsourced enterprise have come into sharper focus.

Thus, according to the article, As we go forward into a third era of globalization – that of revitalized command – we are witnessing yet another metamorphosis in enterprise strategy and structure. The multinational enterprise is becoming more risk-averse and less likely to over-extend itself through alliances, and is showing an emerging bias toward more direct absorption and control over assets in its network.

Or, in plain English, companies have realized that the strategy of outsourcing every function but the function of outsourcing itself might not have been the best strategy. Although it’s true that end-to-end vertical integration is probably not the right strategy, because no company can do everything well, it’s also true that outsourcing too much is not a great idea either, because then you’re left with a shell that can’t do anything. Thus, companies are beginning to realize that the right approach is to find a balance somewhere in the middle – a balance that allows them to retain the functions that they are good at, and core to their, business and to outsource those functions that are not core, or that they are not very good at. Thus, the third era of supply chain will be the era of balance – where a nice equilibrium is found between the “vertical” do-it-all-yourself strategy of the past and the “horizontal” outsource-everything-under-the-sun strategy of the present.

The article then discusses what this might mean for the public sector, the varying impact by company size and scale, and the results of a survey designed to help determine the extent of supply chain management in the global marketplace. The study, which tried to assess a range of factors, found that the degree of supply chain collaboration between respondents and suppliers was moderate at best. Considering that failure to develop a supply chain management program that fully accomplishes integrated operations may result in poorly engineered products, product recalls, excess inventory costs, stockouts, and diminishing levels of customer satisfaction, I would hope that the sample size (of about 300 respondents) is not indicative of the vast majority of global multinationals, since this would indicate most companies still have a long way to go to get a grip on their supply chains and find the balance that is their key to success.

It’s Time To Get Your Trade Data In Order

Did you know that, right now:

  • You could be eligible for VAT rebates?
  • You could be eligible for Import Duty refunds?
    or that …
  • You could be overpaying for freight?
  • You could be saving more if you took advantage of trade agreements or trade zones?
    or that …
  • You could be buying counterfeit goods?
  • You could be weeks away from having your supply chain frozen?
    and more!

Let’s start with the Aberdeen findings, which have been, more-or-less, corroborated by Hackett. There are millions (upon millions) of dollars in working capital languishing in your international supply chain. A $1B company can easily free $10M to $40M in cash by better controlling just its basic global trade processes. Aberdeen found:

  • Large companies’ international supply chains are only 50% as automated as their domestic supply chains.
  • 87% of large enterprises have inadequate staffing to manage global supply chain and global trade compliance processes.
  • Trade compliance is consistently a low priority for IT funding.

Now let’s add the Global Data Mining findings that error rates in global trade processes approach 10 to 20% and that effective control of global trade processes is often 100 to 200 times worse when compared to accounts payable processes in an average company!

Basically, the following is a reality for your average multi-national, whether it realizes it or not:

  • It’s manufacturing facilities in China are still failing to claim VAT rebates they are eligible for, because it is unaware that some of its goods are now eligible under the recent changes that took place this summer.
  • It’s using outdated HTS codes and some of these codes have a higher tax rate than what it could be paying if it was using the new HTS codes that took effect in January of this year.
  • It’s not keeping track of total freight payments by carrier and cross-referencing its 3PL agreements and not demanding the discounts that were supposed to come into play once a certain threshold was reached – discounts that sourcing spent a lot of time negotiating into the contract in an attempt to save the organization money.
  • It’s not taking advantage of special economic zones in India and China that offer tax exemptions for items simply passing through the country and / or lower tax rates on corporate profits and not taking advantage of US Foreign Trade Zones that allow payment of duties to be deferred until the product leaves the trade zones.
  • It’s going through a distributor to buy its goods from China, and this distributor is actually distributing counterfeit goods!
  • It still hasn’t updated it’s entire fleet to be ACE compliant. Now that ACE has been rolled out at almost every land border port in the US, CBP expects that all truck-based shipments will be supplying ACE-compliant e-manifests BEFORE the truck reaches the border. Send the wrong truck – and it won’t be going anywhere for a while – freezing your supply chain!

So what can you do? Besides better educating yourself on what’s involved in Global Trade, starting with the Introduction to Global Trade wiki-paper, and the Customs and Security Primer, Free Trade Primer, and Regulatory Compliance Primer on the e-Sourcing Wiki [WayBackMachine], you can start by getting an audit of your processes and data and see where you’re weak and where the greatest refund and savings opportunities are.

Make sure to do a complete review of trade agreement management, FTZ/STZ analysis, HTS classifications, VAT payments, supply chain finance strategies, freight, and sourcing opportunities. If you’re a Fortune 500 company, this could easily identify 20M to 100M (or more!) of savings that are instantly attainable, above and beyond what you’re going to find in an average strategic sourcing project (even if it does use strategic sourcing decision optimization as this only optimizes the model provided at the category level – it does not look at your sourcing network holistically from a trade perspective, which should be done once every one to three years, on average).

And we still didn’t talk about the fact that “Gender & Age Discrimination is Costing US Importers Billions of Dollars!” (Global Data Mining, acquired by CUSTOMS Info, acquired by Descartes) Data mining analysis has determined US Importer’s have overpaid more than $1.3 billion in discriminatory duties over the past two years. When it comes to tariffs on clothing, shoes, and other age or gender differentiated products, there is often no apparent pattern which penalize men in some instances, and women in others. Research has identified more than 2,200 pairs of US Harmonized Tariff codes (HS codes) impacted by discriminatory duties, over 300 for Age Discrimination and more than 1,900 for Gender Discrimination. More than 40 importers have already filed a lawsuit to protect their interests. Have you?

That’s why Global Data Mining is Sourcing Innovation’s Vendor of the Week. Not only is it one of the few companies offering these desperately needed audit and data mining services, and doing so at a rate every company can afford (it’s goal is to provide you with a blended cost of under $100 per man hour – compared to the Big Consulting Shops who want to charge you at least three times that), but it’s also one of the few companies making a concerted effort to educate you on what savings opportunities you may be missing in your global trade operations and what issues, such as the gender & age discrimination in HTS duties, you should be aware of, and speaking out against. Check them out.

Achieving Supply Chain Visibility

Supply & Demand Executive recently ran an article by Aatish Goel & Murali Krishnan Sundararajan on “The Flat Supply Chain” that noted that globalization has created a massive increase in supply chain complexity and that supply chain visibility is emerging as a critical differentiator for companies to stay ahead of the competition.

The article also suggested that companies should manage supply chain visibility according to the process-technology-organization framework, and recommended the following from the process angle.

  • Effective S&OP Process Deployment
    An effective S&OP process brings the right information in front of all stakeholders in a timely manner.
  • Internal & External Inventory Turns Review
    Use a multi-echelon inventory visibility system that allows for regular review of inventory status inside the company and inside the supply chain as a whole.
  • Alerts & Exception Management
    The amount of data produced by a well-run supply chain at any point in time is huge and almost impossible for anyone to review manually (even with great analysis and reporting tools). Thus, it is important to have exception reporting and alerts to bring critical incidents and issues to the immediate attention of the right person.
  • Alignment of Supply Chain Metrics with Business Goals
    Use process-based metrics that complement business goals to monitor and improve the process.

This was a good starting list, but I’d also add at least the following:

  • Integrate PoS data and forecasting across the supply chain
    A supply chain view of inventory is not very useful if you do not know how much product you should have at any given location at any given time, and given that demand can fluctuate, using static forecasts to plan inventory is not optimal.
  • Use collaborative issue resolution processes
    When a critical incident occurs upstream in your supply chain that effects you, it’s important not just to insure your supplier, or your supplier’s supplier, starts working on a resolution immediately, but that you work with the supplier to not only insure a quick resolution, but to understand why the critical incident happened in the first place. Then, you can pass that knowledge onto your other suppliers and make sure it doesn’t happen to them.
  • Regular Review of Transportation Timeframes
    When calculating inventory requirements, it’s vital to understand how long, on average, it will take to restock a location in order to insure that you can handle demand spikes and not lose sales. If it takes 7 days, but a demand spike due to an upcoming promotion could wipe out inventory in 3 days, then it might be wise to temporarily increase the inventory requirements of that remote location.
  • Use Process Models
    Standardized, Integrated, S&OP processes are good – but streamlined process that are sound and complete are better. A process model will help you analyze your processes to make sure they are of just the right complexity. If your process is too simple, you could miss critical incidents or key data that could significantly change your forecasts and inventory requirements. Too complex, and you could lose the ability to react quickly.

From an organizational technology angle, the article had the following to offer:

  • Use an extended enterprise system.
    This will allow you to create a centralized data store, on which you can execute the data mining applications needed to detect exceptions and critical incidents, the analytic applications need to determine required inventory levels and transportation timeframes, and the reporting applications necessary to insure key information gets to key stake-holders in a timely and comprehensible manner.
  • Extend it with specific business solutions.
    The article recommends inventory optimization tools, business intelligence tools, and master data management tools.
  • Look at Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)
    This can enable flexible collaboration at a lower cost.

This is a great start, but you should also consider the following:

  • Look at On-Demand SaaS
    Building a completely integrated supply chain management framework, even using SOA, will be a very time-consuming and costly endeavor even for the most technologically sophisticated organization. Starting with on-demand SaaS can allow an organization to get a fairly sophisticated system of supply chain management tools up-and-running quickly and cost-effectively.

In conclusion, the authors have it right – with supply chain complexity having increased exponentially in the last decade thanks to globalization and increased outsourcing, visibility is becoming key to managing risk and total cost and the time to do something about it is now.

“Demand Shaping” or “Demand Sensing”?

The EE Times ran a great article by Romit Dey and Manoj K. Singh last month on “Demand Shaping” and how it aligns customer trends with supply. But I have to ask, is it really “demand shaping” or is it more “demand sensing”. Is not “demand shaping” what marketing and advertising does? It’s true that supply chain has a supporting role, in terms of letting marketing know how much a product can be produced for, how many units can be produced, and how fast the units can be in consumers hands. However, what supply chain really does, in a company that runs like a well-oiled machine, is sense the demand that has been created, and the demand that is in flux, and adapts to the situation.

So what is “demand sensing”? According to the article, which calls it “demand shaping”, it is a demand-driven, supply-constraining customer-centric approach to planning and execution that aligns process with customer demand at strategic and tactical levels and with an organization’s capabilities which helps optimize use of resources, reducing excess inventory and improving inventory turns. More specifically, at the strategic level, the emphasis is on aligning customers’ long-term demand patterns to long-term resource and capacity constraints and at he tactical level, the focus is on understanding demand patterns and then influencing customers’ demand toward available supply, using the levers of price, promotion and products/services bundling.

How do you sense demand? As the article points out, you need three key capabilities:

  • demand pattern recognition
    who is buying what, when, and in what quantity
  • supply supportability analysis
    how much can be made, when, and how fast can it be delivered
  • optimal demand steering
    if demand patterns suddenly change, and you do not have enough of product A, can product B be used as a substitute and can customers be steered to that product instead

The first skill is obvious – you need to manage inventory appropriately so you aren’t holding too much, and generating excessive inventory carrying charges, or holding too little, and selling out before supply can be replenished. The second skill is less obvious, but easily understood – you need to know how much you can make, and how fast it can be made, to appropriately plan your inventory level.

The third skill is what takes “demand sensing” to a whole new level, to the point that it is almost “demand shaping”, but not quite, and hence the source of confusion. It is, as it’s called, “demand steering”. The Dell example the authors use is the best. By maintaining real-time visibility into its supply chains, Dell knows its inventory levels now and in the immediate future on an hourly basis. If a customer configures an order for a 60GB drive on their web-site, and Dell knows they don’t have enough stock to configure the system immediately, then Dell informs the user of a delayed ship date and presents the customer with an opportunity to replace it with an 80GB drive at a discount – steering the customer towards another product that can meet their needs, even if it is more expensive, but Dell takes a discount on margin to make the sale and keep the customer.

The key to success, as the article points out, is to make sure that all three processes are part of a single, integrated loop. A supply supportability analysis is run on a regular, automated, basis; inventory is updated on a near real-time basis; and short-term forecasts are updated at least daily. Each of these numbers is compared on an automated basis, and as soon as forecasts exceed inventory and obtainable supply, an alert is sent to a planner who determines whether there are alternative products that can be used to meet the need or if marketing and sales needs to be informed that they need to take actions to steer demand on their end. Then, customers are steered towards the alternative products through the appropriate channels – in real-time.

The article also does a good job at overviewing what is required for a demand sensing framework. The elements it outlines are:

  • inter and intra organizational connectivity
  • the ability to capture, structure, and comprehend data from customers and channels
  • advanced business intelligence to identify demand patterns
  • optimization
  • common processes
  • a common data model
  • common performance metrics
  • available-to-process capabilities
  • exception management
  • electronic negotiation and collaboration

The best thing about the framework is that these are basic capabilities and processes a good organization should already have in place. It’s just a matter of tying them together and using them wisely!