@ Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Design is an oft overlooked field of specialty because of the “math” involved. While several providers have come up with nice interfaces to hide that math – the truth of the matter is that without the math, you’re slipping constants into GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) mode.

Supply Chain Management Review and Logistics Management have made this free webcast available on this topic : Winning through Better Supply Chain Design.

Jean-Francois Puget is a distinguished engineer at IBM in the Optimization and Analytics practice. He has made available a slide deck about lessons learnt when selling optimization to business users. He offers his prescient views on how businesses approach the topic of optimization – worth a read.

Follow him at his own blog @ IT Best Kept Secret is Optimization.

Tags: Jean-Francois Puget, Optimization, IBM, Optimization for Business Users

This article by SC Digest: Supply Chain Network Design – By the Book is about a new kid on the block (a book: Supply Chain Network Design: Applying Optimization and Analytics to the Global Supply Chain) as far as Supply Chain Modeling and Optimization goes.

As you might be aware I’m not really that keen on the adoption of optimization in businesses even though I’m sold on the absolute necessity of it. I’ve outlined several reasons over several posts on this blog : Coming off a tough tough project (for starters).

Some of the ideas in the article are tried and tested – as in I was employing them in Supply Chain Consulting way back in 2004-06 timeframe.

Happy New Year to all of you…

Start designing you life is an article by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO which is an interesting way to start off the year. I’m a great believer and user of mind mapping tools

– As a way of brainstorming

– Documentation and sharing

The tools that I tend to use are also free and open source, Freemind and Freeplane (which is a fork of the former). There are a lot more cloud based mind mappers too these days.