Source: CSCMP

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I recently came back to school and have been studying for a while. About a month ago when I was selecting my courses and arranging my time table for the semester, I had to go through the course list to see what the school provided. I noticed something that I wasn’t able to catch before. All the courses installed in our department were very delicately intertwined with each other forming bodies of knowledge that seemed to be essential for logistics. The individual courses and subjects were parts of other traditional fields of studies such as Industrial Engineering, Transportation Engineering, Economics, Business Management. But somehow these branches with different roots seemed to stretch towards a common direction. It took me 6 semesters to get this insight. It wasn’t until now that I was able to actually see or understand this big picture, or the road map, of becoming a skillful logistician.

As you guys may have felt while studying and working in this field, logistics is a fairly new field in universities. The characteristics of the study itself is very unique too. It requires its practitioners to equip analytical and mathematical skills that par to an Engineer, and at the same time it wants us to have the business mind of an MBA! You can easily see logistics or SCM majors installed in business schools and MBA programs, but at the same time many other Universities have these programs embedded in their Industrial Engineering, or Transportation Engineering departments.

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The approach to sales and operation planning differs from company to company, even within similar industries. In this article, I would like to discuss basic, high level principles of S&OP and why every organization, big or small needs to make it an integral part of their management strategy.

APICS defines S&OP as a process that provides management the ability to strategically direct its business to achieve competitive advantage on a continuous basis. It is the executive decision making process that enables an organization to respond to demand and supply variation and risks with timely and data driven decisions (of course, this is assuming that the data in your ERP/planning systems are accurate and you have capable reporting tools).Basically, it is a platform that enables companies to establish a game plan for the allocation of resources within an intermediate time horizon (usually 18 – 24 months) to meet demand for product families.

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The most common question I get after the obligatory “What is your major?” is always “What is supply chain management??”  This is not a common area of study and I’ll admit I had no idea what is was when I came to college either.  This is a huge problem, at least at Iowa State University.  Incoming freshman don’t know what the major is so they choose not to major in it.  Provided below are some ideas to create early interest in the major and in APICS:

–Have supply chain students speak about the major in the entry-level freshman classes.  This I will provide a basic understanding of the major.  Also talk about what fun things the APICS group does. (more…)

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As  I mentioned in my previous post, the C2C concept presumes that value adding recycling, or the ‘upcycling’, is possible. Therefore the smart companies that wish to implement C2C to their products must expand their concerns to beyond the point of sales and consider how to retrieve the product after the product has reached the end of its life cycle and bring it back to the ‘Cradle’ state. Lack of such considerations in the product design phase will result it unsatisfactory improvements, since the poor coordination is likely to limit the efforts to downcycling which, in the end, will end up with waste. Unfortunately once unexpected waste is introduced into this process, additional cost is required for detoxicating and processing it in order to convert that waste into a form that is  recyclable  or reusable. So, why not get it right the first time?

At the end of every products life cycle, the products are collected and broken down into fragments. Some of these parts may become components of a new product and some will dissolve into nature without causing harm. The former case is a situation where the product was made out of technical nutrients, and the latter situation is a case where biological nutrient was used. As you might have guessed, converting the used product into these nutrients, and planning beforehand so that this conversion is possible is how we can achieve our C2C goal. This section will be mainly focusing on the two types of nutrients.

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I decided to cover the ‘C2C Paradigm’ as My first topic. I underwent some research and figured this would be a pretty interesting topic to share with the APICS Young Professional/Student Blog community. I am planning on blogging on this topic for the next 3 weeks. Today I’ll be introducing the main concept and context of C2C , and I will cover the actual methodologies of adapting C2C in actual business next week. I hope to cover the benefits and the effects of C2C by the end of this month.

Part 1: The Concept

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I had the opportunity to meet Prof Chandra S Lalwani and attend his public lecture at RMIT, on the 25th Aug 2010, where he discussed the above topic. Prof.Lawani holds a Chair in Supply Chain Management in Business School at University of Hull, UK and is Co-Editor in Chief for the International Journal of Logistics Management.

I found the lecture interesting and decided to share it with the APICS Blog readers. The lecture addressed issues and challenges identified during research carried out in the UK, India, China and Thailand in 2009-2010. Further, the discussion was based on how to design the next-generation supply chain, based on scenario planning, where satisfying the customer is of utmost importance and higher demands are placed on:

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I am sitting in my office wondering what my first post on the APICS blog should be about. I have scribbled out a list of topics in front of me, but the one that won’t get out of my head is the question “how did you get yourself here?”

In fact, I would like to ask you the same question, what made you choose to work in the supply chain industry? What aspect of it fascinated you? Was it by choice or chance?

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Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) distributes over 2 Billion cases per year from more than 350 warehouses across North America. About 80% of North American population receives their everyday favorite sodas, iced tea, fruit juices and flavored water daily through CCE.

This demands sophisticated and high accuracy rate for all warehouse operations. The industry benchmarks its order fulfillment accuracy rate against the ones demanded by Wal-Mart, which is a whopping 98.8%. To address the increasing number of SKUs (which rose four-fold in the past few years due to increase in product lines driven by consumer taste and competition) and to improve order fulfillment accuracy, CCE adopted Datria System’s Voice Enabled Picking System in their warehouses.

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