Engineering to Order at Kratos Space – Making Parts Availability a Strategic Advantage
The Kratos Space group within National Security technology innovator Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., produces COTS s software and component products for space communications – Making Parts Availability a Strategic Advantage
Share, develop, and manage consensus demand plans
Ensure inventory policy matches business strategy. Various team members can create their own scenarios, perhaps dividing the work by product line or sales territory. One decision maker can then merge these scenarios into a consensus plan.
Gaming Out Your Logistical Response to the Corona Virus
This short note is about one way your business can develop a plan to adjust to one of the likely fallouts from the virus: sudden increases in the time it takes to get inventory replenishment from suppliers. Supply chains around the world are being disrupted. If this happens to you, how can you react in a systematic way?
FORECAST DRIVEN INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Forecast-based inventory management policy, also known as MRP logic, is the fourth in our series on major approaches to managing inventory. We begin by looking at some very simple and then more robust models of inventory dynamics that help us determine how much to order or manufacture and when. We then consider how to calculate lead time and account for lead time variability. Tom concludes by describing the importance of safety stock, it’s role in properly buffering against demand and supply uncertainty, and how best to calculate it.
Managing Demand Variability
Anybody doing the job knows that managing inventory can be stressful. Common stressors include: Customers with “special” requests, IT departments with other priorities, balky ERP systems running on inaccurate data, raw material shortages, suppliers with long lead times in far-away countries where production often stops for various reasons and more. This note will address one particular and ever-present source of stress: demand variability.
How do you know Min/Max policy is working well for you?
The Min/Max inventory policy is one of three available in SIO. When the inventory level drops to or below the Min, a replenishment order is generated. The reorder quantity is the number of units needed to raise the stock up to the Max.
Top 3 Most Common Inventory Control Policies
To make the right decision, you’ll need to know how demand forecasting supports inventory management, choice of which policy to use, and calculation of the inputs that drive these policies.The process of ordering replenishment stock is sufficiently expensive and cumbersome that you also want to minimize the number of purchase orders you must generate.
How to Choose a Target Service Level to Optimize Inventory
When setting a target service level, make sure to take into account factors like current service levels, replenishment lead times, cost constraints, the pain inflicted by shortages on you and your customers, and your competitive position.
If there is a recession, you should …
Continuously update your inventory control parameters: reorder points, order quantities, safety stocks, mins, maxes, lead times. Beyond that, you should be updating your inventory strategies.
Ten Tips that Avoid Data Problems in Software Implementation
Once a customer is ready to implement software for demand planning and/or inventory optimization, they need to connect the analytics software to their corporate data stream.This provides information on item demand and supplier lead times, among other things. We extract the rest of the data from the ERP system itself, which provides metadata such as each item’s location, unit cost, and product group.
Reveal Your Real Inventory Planning and Forecasting Policy by Answering These 10 Questions
In this blog, we review 10 specific questions you can ask to uncover what’s really happening with the inventory planning and demand forecasting policy at your company. We detail the typical answers provided when a forecasting/inventory planning policy doesn’t really exist, explain how to interpret these answers, and offer some clear advice on what to do about it.
Riding the Tradeoff Curve
In the supply chain planning world, the most fundamental decision is how to balance item availability against the cost of maintaining that availability (service levels and fill rates). At one extreme, you can grossly overstock and never run out until you go broke and have to close up shop from sinking all your cash into inventory that doesn’t sell.
Quantum Inventory Theory?
Physics at the quantum level is quite weird – not at all like what we experience in our usual macroscopic life. Among the oddities are “superposition”, “entanglement”, and “quantum foam.” Weird as these phenomena are, I cannot help seeing analogs in the supposedly different world of supply chain management.
Stop Leaking Money with Manual Inventory Controls
An inventory professional who is responsible for 10,000 items has 10,000 things to stress over every day. Double that for someone responsible for 20,000 items. In the crush of business, routine decisions often take second place to fire-fighting: dealing with supplier hiccups, straightening out paperwork mistakes, recovering from that collision between a truck and the loading dock.
Key Considerations When Evaluating your ERP system’s Forecasting Capabilities
Consider what is meant by “demand management”, “demand planning”, and “forecasting”. These terms imply certain standard functionality for collaboration, statistical analysis, and reporting to support a professional demand planning process. However, in most ERP systems, “demand management” running MRP and reconciling demand and supply for the purpose of placing orders
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Inventory Planning Processes: Challenges and OpportunitiesSmart Software is pleased to introduce our new series of educational webinars, offered exclusively for Epicor Users. Greg Hartunian, CEO at Smart Software, will lead a 45-minute webinar focusing on specific approaches to demand forecasting and inventory planning. […]