Business Forecasting 2013 Predictive Intelligence Summit

On June 24 and 25, there was a conference in Chicago. It was the Business Forecasting 2013 Predictive Intelligence Summit. There were four hundred attendees to hear 25 thought leaders in the industry. CR Supply Chain Consulting was well represented at the Summit by Mark Gavoor, Managing Director of CR Supply Chain Consulting, and Ara Surenian, President of our sister company Cadent Resources, Inc. Both spoke on Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). Both are experts in implementing and optimizing S&OP in smaller companies.

Click to read more ...

The 2013 Supply Chain Challenge

We would like to wish our clients and friends a most happy, healthy, and prosperous 2013! The US and World economies continue to creep forward. No one is satisfied with the pace of recovery. The Great Recession began four years ago and no one can claim we have recovered to the pre-recession glory days of "irrational exuberance." We are, as we at CR Supply Chain have emphasized from the beginning, in a New Normal. We have been in it long enough that it is just the plain old normal now.

Click to read more ...

The People Part of S&OP: Part II

In the 1950s, coal mining productivity in the UK decreased. Ironically, productivity went down because of the introduction of machinery specifically designed to improve productivity. Why did the machinery not increase productivity? While the machinery was designed to improve productivity, the people part of the system was still operating under the status quo. No wonder productivity went in the wrong direction.

Click to read more ...

The People Part of S&OP: Part I

Lora Cecere is one smart supply chain expert. She began her career as a supply chain professional with the companies like Clorox and P&G. She worked at Manugistics developing supply chain software and then moved on to become a top notch supply chain analyst and thinker at the Gartner Group and AMR Research. Currently she is the CEO of a Supply Chain Insights and the author of the best supply blog there is: Supply Chain Shaman. (Don't get us wrong, we are proud of our blog but we Supply Chain Shaman is the standard against which we measure ourselves.)

Click to read more ...

ERP and Excel: Part II

In Part I, we discussed the proper use of Excel with ERPs. We advised against using Excel to manage planning and other operational transactions. In Part II, we will backtrack on that advice, a little, and discuss when it is actually appropriate to use Excel spreadsheets for operations planning and other transactions.

Click to read more ...