@ Supply Chain Management

Or rather on my plate. I want to draw your attention to these two challenges that are floating out there in cyberspace – prize money being offered for your (my) troubles as well if one contributes something of value:

1. The first one is the older of the two – The Netflix Prize, which is a problem in improving the accuracy of the movie recommendation system that is used by Netflix (in addition to several other ecommerce sites). This is something that I started working on before I got deluged at work but I hope to pick up the pieces again and make a try.

2. The second challenge is being offered by ROADEF, the French Society of Operations Research – which is to use OR techniques in Disruption Management for Commercial Aviation. I’m sure that if you fly these days, you’d appreciate a little succor from such sources and I’m glad that people are being invited to contribute towards solving this problem. Since I’m working in applying optimization to such problems, this is something I definitely will consider working on.

So, any takers?

Tags: Optimization Challenge, Netflix Prize, ROADEF, Disruption Management in Commercial Aviation

Outsourcing Reverse Logistics is a recent article posted Modern Materials Handling.com that has an interview with Tim Konrad of GENCO (my former employer) – it’s a niche for GENCO that it has been rather good at exploiting . He notes the following key points concerning reverse logistics as practiced by a 3PL:

Do it in volume

Establish vendor agreements

Implement a software package

Receive, inspect and dispose

Reconciliation

If you wanted to know what happens to a product that you returned for whatever reason:

Building a resilient supply chain is a report (freely available) published by Marsh (MMC) which focuses on supply chain risks as assessed in a free wheeling interview with a panel of six experts.

Karen Avery : National practice leader for Marsh