Cost Reduction in Supply Chains by Opportunity and by Design
When customers step up pressure on prices and when economic growth flattens or dips, a supply manager’s mind turns to cost reduction. Or rather, it turns even more to cost reduction, as squeezing out savings that then show up directly on the bottom line is a...
3 Guiding Principles for Sustained Working Capital Reduction
Working capital reduction is something which companies often overlook until tough financial times threaten solvency. When those times arrive, working capital reduction efforts are often frantic and centred on formal or informal extension of payment...
How to Target Cycle Times for Working Capital Reduction
Cycle times in the supply chain have a large part to play in your company's working capital. The ability to reduce inventory levels is only one of a number of reasons to target cycle times as a way to reduce your working capital needs. Moreover, improving cycle...
3 Things to Stop Doing If You Want To Reduce Working Capital
As a novel change to sharing tips on what to do, I thought I'd continue this month's focus on working capital reduction with a post on things you might consider doing less of or even not doing at all. More specifically, this post delves a little into three...
Don’t Let Inventory Levels Bloat Your Working Capital
Did you ever hear that phrase about "never work with children or animals"? Sometimes I think that short list of hard-to-control entities should be amended to include inventory. For something that sits on a shelf until somebody moves it, inventory seems to have...
Reducing Working Capital in Supply Chains
Is it a good idea to reduce working capital in a supply chain? Yes, in general. On the face of it, “working capital” might sound like something you’d want to increase. However, it corresponds to the amount of money you need to keep your supply chain working, so...
Cost to Serve and Business Profitability
One of the major supply chain management challenges facing businesses today is to understand their cost to serve (CTS) in detail. Application of Cost to Serve can improve EBIT performance by up to 20% What is Cost to Serve? What benefit does it deliver?...
The Deceptive Simplicity of Boosting Productivity in Supply Chains
Productivity is a deceptively simple concept. For a supply chain, as for other functions, productivity is the ratio of what you get out to what you put in. This “output versus input” definition covers achievements of the workforce, results from the use of...
Online Supply Chain Forum
Supply Chain Forum Established in 2005 the Supply Chain Forum provides an online community for Supply Chain professionals to share knowledge and seek answers. With thousands of members from around the Globe it provides a useful resource for those wishing to improve...
Changing Your Perspective to Measure Supply Chain Performance
Why measure the performance of a supply chain? Because a supply chain is increasingly the sole competitive differentiator for an enterprise, and measuring its performance helps to improve it and detect and solve any problems. However, traditional enterprise measures...