Supply chain
Planning and network decisions: demand and supply planning, inventory policy, sourcing, resilience, and how a network is designed and measured.
- ABC analysis: directing attention across an uneven catalogue
Ranking items by contribution to focus planning effort, and why a second dimension is needed before the classification is useful.
- Bullwhip effect: why order swings grow upstream
The mechanisms that amplify demand variation at each stage of a chain, and the practical changes that dampen the amplification.
- Business continuity planning for supply operations
Building continuity plans for supply and distribution that survive contact with a real event: scope, dependencies, triggers and testing.
- Capacity planning: sizing the ability to supply
How to size production, storage and handling capability against a demand plan, and when to lead, lag or hedge the investment.
- Consignment stock: goods on site that you do not yet own
How consignment arrangements shift ownership and working capital, the obligations they create, and where the risk quietly remains.
- Control towers: the operating model behind the screen
What makes a control tower work — decision rights, escalation rules and staffing — as opposed to another consolidated dashboard.
- Cost to serve: finding out which orders lose money
Allocating supply chain cost to customers, channels and orders to reveal where gross margin is consumed after the sale is made.
- Demand planning: turning a forecast into a usable number
How a demand plan is built, challenged and signed off, and why statistical output alone is not a plan the business can commit to.
- Demand variability: classifying how demand actually behaves
How to characterise demand patterns — smooth, seasonal, erratic, intermittent — and why the classification drives planning method.
- Disruption management: running a supply chain during the event
How to detect, assess and respond to a live supply interruption, including allocation decisions and communication while facts are moving.
- Distribution network tiers: what each layer is for
The role of central, regional and forward stocking layers, how flows are assigned between them, and when a tier stops earning its place.
- Dual sourcing: running two qualified sources for one part
How to split volume between two approved suppliers, what the arrangement really costs, and how to keep the second source viable.
- Economic order quantity: sizing an order against two costs
The trade-off between ordering cost and holding cost, why the resulting curve is flat, and where the classic model stops applying.
- Forecast accuracy: measuring error so it changes something
Choosing error measures that expose bias and dispersion, fixing the lag and level of measurement, and using results to improve the process.
- Friendshoring: sourcing along political alignment
Choosing supply locations by political alignment rather than distance or cost, and the practical limits of treating alignment as durable.
- Inventory planning: deciding what stock is for
Setting stock targets by purpose — cycle, safety, seasonal, in-transit — so inventory is funded deliberately rather than accumulated.
- Inventory turnover: what turns tell you and what they hide
How turnover is calculated, why comparing it across businesses misleads, and how to use it as a diagnostic rather than a target.
- Lead time management: shortening and stabilising the clock
Decomposing quoted lead time into its real components, and why reducing its variability usually pays more than reducing its length.
- Logistics planning: turning a supply plan into flow commitments
How volumes, flow paths, service tiers and seasonal ramps are planned and committed before any goods are booked or handled.
- Make or buy: deciding where the company boundary sits
Framing the choice between internal production and external supply around capability, cost behaviour, capacity and long-term dependence.
- Multi-echelon inventory: setting stock across levels together
Why stock levels at each node should be set jointly rather than independently, and what pooling upstream does to total buffer requirements.
- Nearshoring: trading unit cost for responsiveness
What moving supply into a nearby region changes about lead time, stock and flexibility, and where the capacity to absorb it exists.
- Network design: how many nodes, where, serving whom
The trade-offs behind the number and location of plants, hubs and stocking points, and what makes a network study credible.
- Offshoring: what a distant production location really buys
Why production moves to distant economies, the costs that arrive after the business case, and when the arithmetic stops working.
- Postponement: holding variety back until demand is known
Delaying the point at which a product becomes specific to a customer or market, and what has to change in design and network for it to work.
- Procurement: from identified need to secured supply
The stages of a procurement cycle, who authorises what, and the controls that keep spend visible and supply contractually secured.
- Purchase orders: what the document commits you to
What a purchase order establishes commercially, which fields carry the risk, and how orders behave under call-off agreements.
- Purchase requisitions: controlling demand before it becomes spend
How internal requests are captured, challenged and authorised before an order exists, and how to keep the control from being bypassed.
- Reorder points: setting the trigger that starts resupply
How a reorder trigger is composed, which stock position it should read, and why stale triggers cause shortages and surplus at once.
- Replenishment: choosing the model that refills stock
Continuous review, periodic review and pull-based refill compared, and how to match a replenishment model to item behaviour.
- Reshoring: bringing production home and what it requires
The conditions that make domestic production viable again, the ecosystem gaps that block it, and how to structure a return.
- Safety stock: buying availability with working capital
What safety stock protects against, which variables drive its size, and why setting it by feel is expensive in both directions.
- Sales and operations planning: the monthly decision cycle
How an S&OP cycle is structured, what each step must decide, and the signs that the meeting has stopped changing anything.
- Single sourcing risk: when one supplier is the only option
Why businesses end up with sole sources, what exposure that creates, and the protections available when an alternative is not realistic.
- Stock obsolescence: catching dead inventory before the write-off
Why inventory stops selling, how ageing is detected early, and the disposal routes available before value disappears entirely.
- Strategic sourcing: building a category strategy that holds
How to analyse a spend category, read the supply market, and choose a sourcing approach that survives beyond the first negotiation.
- Supplier diversification: spreading exposure that actually overlaps
How to diversify a supply base along the dimensions that matter — firm, site, region and sub-tier — rather than on paper only.
- Supplier management: governing the base after the contract
How to segment a supplier base, set the right governance for each tier, and manage relationships through to exit.
- Supplier performance management: measuring what you can act on
Choosing supplier measures that reflect real impact, agreeing how they are calculated, and running reviews that change behaviour.
- Supplier qualification: approving a source before you need it
The gates a prospective supplier passes before approval, why qualification takes real time, and how to keep approvals current.
- Supply chain KPIs: a measurement set that survives scrutiny
Selecting a small balanced measurement set across service, cost, capital and quality, and defining each so the figures cannot be gamed.
- Supply chain management: the decisions the function owns
Which decisions a supply chain function actually owns — plan, source, stock, network, risk — and where its authority stops.
- Supply chain mapping: seeing past the first tier
How to build and maintain a map of sources, sites and routes beyond direct suppliers, and what the exercise reliably uncovers.
- Supply chain resilience: designing for shocks you cannot forecast
The structural properties that let a supply chain absorb shocks — buffers, flexibility, redundancy and speed of detection — and their cost.
- Supply chain segmentation: running several chains at once
Grouping products, customers and demand patterns into segments with distinct policies, so one operating model does not serve all of them badly.
- Supply chain visibility: knowing enough to decide
What visibility means beyond shipment tracking, which data actually changes decisions, and how to close the gaps that matter.
- Supply planning: committing capacity, materials and stock
How an agreed demand plan becomes a feasible supply commitment, and what to do when the constraint says the plan cannot be met.
- Total landed cost management: comparing sources honestly
Building a delivered-cost view that includes duty, movement, capital and risk, so sourcing decisions are not made on unit price alone.
- Vendor managed inventory: handing the replenishment decision upstream
How a supplier-run replenishment arrangement works, what has to be agreed before it starts, and where accountability actually sits.
- Vendor management: controlling contracted service providers
Governing service and indirect vendors — contract terms, service commitments, spend visibility and renewals — after the deal is signed.