Consider Multi-Echelon Inventory With Centralized Hubbing to Pool Inventory and Risk

One common way to pool risk and reduce overall inventory is to use a hub with good air and sea connectivity like Singapore.

However, this considers just variability of demand and lead time from a central location to meet customer demand and service level at customer market locations. The cost of under stocking and not meeting customer demand may be more than what we think. Similarly, the cost of overage may be higher and lower. Taking both the cost of overage as underage into account will tell us the stock levels we need to maintain. This is the news vendor approach.

Better still, we can extend the news vendor approach to multi-echelon (or multi-site) inventory allocation problem for stochastic demand and lead time variability. This is especially interesting for Asia where you have manufacturers and transhipment hubs located close to each other. You can measure the service level from cost of under and overage along to set coordinated service levels along supply chains.

Calculating from risk and inventory pooling and multi-echelon approach will help you reinforce the right inventory levels for your supply chain. What's more, you can also use your model to identify areas of capacity, lead time variability and even manufacturing weakness to prioritize improvement.

Approach To Supporting Business Growth With Big Data Analytics

1. Business strategy with congruent and reinforcing operational capability for the targeted market segment is always key to its success. This should always be the first step. This guides the allocation of capital for focus and accepting trade-offs. Companies may decide to focus on providing the most relevant designs to their customers to entice them to buy, or be able to provide customers with wide range of products to meet their needs.

2. Develop a theory of cause and effect to assess presumed drivers of the business strategy. This requires someone who is close to business, and understand common financial and non-financial drivers to the business. Sales, costs and investments are typical financial drivers. Return on capital invested, earnings growth and cad flow growth are some more specific financial measures. Non financial measures include customer loyalty, latency, recency, frequency, monetary and product quality measures. Measure these drivers for statistical correlations to see if one's cause and effect theory is correct. There should be experiments on examining theories that will fail. Worse is if one doesn't try at all.

3. Identify activities that employees and customers can do to achieve business goals. If customer satisfaction drives business value, then find reliable drivers of customer satisfaction. If is about speed of processing? Or performance of the funds invested? Perform statistical analysis on these specific measures to ascertain causal effect. Base on this, a company can focus on such measures within control
Of departments and employees to ensure process is quick and effective.

4. Don't forget to re-evaluate your statistics to adapt to changing needs. Customer may need to be engaged in the social network with now compared to before. A bank teller becomes less important than the online experience.

Drying Medela Breast Pump Air Tubes

This has got nothing to do with supply chain, but I found a good way to dry Medela breast pump air tubes that has water or milk seeped inside :) First, put a thread through a needle, the type that you use to sew clothes. Stretch your tubes to let the needle (and thread) travel all the way down using gravity. You have insert and take out to a new times if the tube is wet. Finally, let the needle come out from one end and twirl the thread around tube this way to dry the tubes :)