@ Supply Chain Management

David Margulius writes about the recent McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) article about the data capture for supply chain in his column titled Fine-tuning your supply chain. Just reading the headline made me think about i2\’s ABPP system post wherein I was thinking about whether it was really “fine tuning” or “fine tinkering” that managers are upto in the supply chain.McKinsey research offers:

The problem, according to the McKinsey research, is that companies today not only buy more from far-flung third parties in an effort to cut costs, but they also rely more on third-party contractors to move these goods around the globe. That means critical supply chain data (such as quality, inventory, and capacity) is “locked up in the IT systems or spreadsheets of a dozen or more companies.”

I think this was always a problem (I blame Microsoft for the Excel program) especially with technically clueless managers who have just gotten trained on some spreadsheet or powerpoint tool and know only how to deploy such tools. Another source of the problem is as David himself outlines:

Although the McKinsey report makes sense, it misses the boat in one key area: human nature. Companies, as do people, sometimes don’t want to pass information on to partners for competitive reasons, control reasons, or just for no reason at all.

If you\’ve worked in the business world, you just know that this is true – its just human behavior.McKinsey outlines its view of best practices for reuniting supply chain data:

1. Fit information flows to supply chain types. For fashion-oriented products such as iPods, for example, focus on IT connections that help you “chase demand rapidly by providing repaid coordination between designers and suppliers.” But for commodities such as TV tubes, focus on cost and inventory data.

In other words, customize your supply chain operating model (that should ideally integrate a supply chain information and data exchange mode) with your business strategy.

2. Develop deep monitoring capabilities, or systems that allow you to pull key data from both your suppliers’ systems and their suppliers’ systems (you’ll probably have to give suppliers incentives to invest in this, McKinsey warns).

How about “bull-whipping” your suppliers as an incentive to developing deep monitoring capabilities. This should really be the only incentive for suppliers to cooperate with you and anything above and beyond that is a premium that you\’re paying out for reducing the uncertainty for suppliers for free.

3. Think cross-functionally and use detailed scorecards. Your purchasing people may be rewarded for selecting the lowest-cost supplier, but the manufacturing group may be rewarded for keeping inventory low and fill-rates high. They must get in a room and agree on performance metrics to make sure you get all the data you need from your suppliers.

Basic supply chain execution meaning that the supply chain is here and not here. By definition a chain is not one link though the strength of the chain is limited by the strength of its weakest link. If two functional departments are operating together, it makes sense not to incentivize or measure them in contradictory or incoherent ways. There is a thing to be mentioned here about truth – it needs to be repeated or else it is forgottten.

InformationWeek’s Q&A with UC professor Peter Navarro about Riding the Business Cycle more wisely…
According to the professor,

Enterprises can be more competitive by better managing the ups and downs of the business cycle, notably via sharper control of inventory and capital outlays such as technology spending.

Well, that’s something that harkens me back to my days working in the semiconductor equipment industry which is notorious for its expansion and contraction cycles. I went through two cycles of expansion and contraction which was more magnified in the South-East than in the US. The management in my firm was very keen on synchronizing their business decisions with the cycle because it was simply impossible to sit on equipment worth sometimes a quarter of a million swiss francs each and hope to ride out the cycle. The cycles in that time were getting shorter and shorter in time periods. However, my firm had one foot stuck firmly in the past as they manufactured their machines exclusively in Switzerland which meant that even though the quality of the machines were well acknowledged, agility and speed to market were not up to the competition. The market had no problem informing us of the same too.
Professor Navarro avers:

But timing, very often, is as [important] or more important. In terms of inventory-type management, the kind of micro approach to managing inventory is to increase your inventory turnovers as much as possible all of the time. In fact, what you want to do going into or out of a recession is to cut inventory more subtly. When you are coming out of a recession, you want to be building up because you want to be the first on the stock shelves and have the opportunity to sell.

Easier said than done. Imagine the plight of an inventory manager acting contrary to all the information he is getting from the marketplace and his peers in the industry. I’m a fan of contrarian investing but I’ve also found that investing contrary to the market is no easy thing – fear, herd mentality, emotion – they just overpower the rational decision making process. However, there is something else that is missing – in stock trading parlance, it would be, “Never catch a falling knife” or “Don’t try to call the bottom”. If you called the bottom or the top as the case maybe, you’d reap the maximum benefit but then you’d also be trying to catch the falling knife. Nothing like this could work without involvement of the top management but then again that would mean that if the timing were wrong it would be their heads on the chopping block with inventory write-offs and the like. I don’t think that they like their heads getting chopped no matter the bounty of future reward.

You can’t wait until good times are back. Moreover, recessions tend to be shorter than expansions, so there is a window of opportunity there. If you move three, six or nine months faster than your rivals, then you’ve got them.

Well, that’s probably true from government statistics but I don’t think thats the case with reality (Or that’s what I think of government statistics). Official recessions are short and recovery is swift. Take a look at this chart and then tell me that recessions have been swift uniformly.

One thing is certain as we speak. Looking ahead, there seems to be a real chance of a recession looming not in the distant future (like the end of the year). That means that companies ought to be tightening up right now but then government data reports some of the lowest unemployment rates (Ok, I have a quibble with the government data on how unemployment is measured) and from my experience firms have opened up their hiring again. So who’s cutting back right now in the industry at large? I’m seeing more furious M&A activities at this moment instead.
So what should business executives be paying attention to according to the professor:

One of the things I preach is that executives need to be attentive to economic information on a daily basis, and it does not take a lot of time compared to the payoff. The weekly Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) has two really good indices for businesses to keep their eyes on. The first is the Weekly Leading Index, and the second is the Future Inflation Gauge. Together, they provide executives with a simple but powerful forecasting tool.
In addition, the yield curve, which measures the relationship between short-term and long-term interest rates, has a tremendous amount of information in it. The Federal Reserve determines short-term rates, while long-term rates are basically determined by thousands of savvy investors betting billions of dollars on the direction of the economy. When you get the unusual case of an inverted yield curve, where longer-term rates are actually lower than short-term rates, this is can be a sign of a coming recession. An inverted yield curve has, in fact, predicted five out of the last six recessions. …

Here’s something more that Professor Navarro has to say about using the supply chains themselves as forecasting tool:

A well-constructed supply and distribution chain can be its own forecasting tool. I urge your readers not to think of the goal of supply-chain management to always inventory as slow as possible just to tighten, tighten and tighten. In times of recovery, economic recovery and expansion, you actually want to decrease your inventory turnover ratio. But that is not the goal in and of itself. The goal essentially is to move more products into the sales channel at a time when you think demand is going to be moving upward. That way, you can push out your competitors and take advantage of the pent-up demand that gets unleashed. This goes to the point of macro-managing vs. micro-managing your inventory. I think that is a really important distinction, because businesses tend to focus on micro-managing their supply chain, in a sense that they are always trying to squeeze things down, when in fact it is often better to move things up.

I think businesses to a great extent do this that is build up inventory in anticipation of great sales coming up but whether they do this in concert with business cycles I cannot say. However, what I have seen is that there is no risk management applied to the efforts to ramp up or ramp down. I’m looking into how I can adapt stochastic optimization into supply chain design and development and that would address the matters of uncertainty that crop up with business cycle forecasting.
In conclusion, I think that the Professor has some great points and insights to offer but then again do those recommendations jive with the behavior of man in general. I think what the Professor is advocating is contrarian business cycle management or efforts that go towards that. But there’s a reason why there are only a few good contrarian investors and that’s because there are only a few good investors to begin with.

SupplyChainDigest reports on what i2 plans as its “Next Generation” solution in the supply chain space.
Whatever i2 is pushing is based on its Agile Business Process Platform (ABPP) – so it helps to ask what exactly is the ABPP? ABPP is explained on i2’s website as:

The i2 Agile Business Process Platform is a finely tuned, synergistic development suite designed to support new-generation supply chain management solutions.

Alright, what does that distil down to?

This new-generation platform functions much like a “factory”, in which standardized application components such as data models, business rules, user interfaces (UI), and business workflows can quickly be assembled and then adapted to meet company-specific business and market needs. The platform can bring greater speed, agility, quality, and cost-efficiency to any supply chain.

I have a lot of experience, way back in 1998-2000, working with Labview from National Instruments which is a prototype systems software development tool that I used in the R&D labs. And the above description by i2 sounds a lot like a Labview type of environment within which a business can structure its supply chain planning, design and development processes. More details about the ABPP:

The platform makes up a comprehensive environment for supply chain management application development, including:
Core platform services. Including distributed process modeling, execution and monitoring, business rules definition, and web and rich-content UI generation.
Data services. With extensive supply chain data models and processes for validation, synchronization, staging, and aggregation.
Integration services. From bulk data transport and mapping to web services support for messaging and generic EAI.
Application development. With a proven studio environment for the integrated development, modeling, testing, deployment, and maintenance of new solutions.

Now, that is something to look forward to and I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. However, I would like to see how successful i2’s efforts are going to be in bringing a client’s organization up to speed on using even half of the functionalities described above. Will it turn out that i2 itself would have to invest a significant portion of resources to develop templates that will be adapted by the end-user. Or will there be special programmers such as ABAP programmers who do such customization. Time wil tell.
Back to the SupplyChainDigest article:

John Cummings of i2’s chief marketing officer says, “Historically, not enough of customer spending on SCM solutions went to true process innovation. Next generation supply chain is also about trying to change that.”

So here we have the notion that process innovation is going to be spurred within a firm by bringing in a tool from i2. Really? I don’t think so. What could happen is that in firm’s that have truly grasped and implemented process innovation is going to find i2’s tools more than helpful in building up a significant competitive advantage. But the source of that competitive advantage resides in the process innovation that prexisted the arrival of a tool but the extent of success derived would be greatly assisted by a tool such as that envisioned by i2.

John Cummings continues, “If you look at the Plan-Do-Check Act model, we’ve always been able to deliver the “Plan-Do” part, but not necessarily been able to close the loop on that and get to “Check-Act”.

All he is saying is confirming the view expressed above. The success of the PDCA model, a continuous process improvement methodology, is that it is a competency that pre-exists any tool that is brought in from the outside. In fact, I’d think that it is not dependent on any tool. But the next sentiment gets my undivided attention:

Now we like to do what I call “managing while tuning” the supply chain, tuning all the parameters in the planning cycle to make sure you’re getting the right answers.

I’d hazard a guess that John Cummings has a systems background of some sort, either in education or in some previous work experience capacity. “Managing while tuning” is so fine an art which is unfortunately not taught in any school except in control theory and perhaps then only for control systems and not for general systems that abstract control models – such as the activities of the firm. However, in the world at large, we usually “Manage while tinkering” which is just about the opposite of “Manage while tuning” which implies a strong grasp on the fundamentals of how to structure and execute the firm’s activities. But I’m impressed at the sweep of what i2’s tinkering with here.
More from John Cummings:

What struggled a little bit with what to name it, but it