108th Daily Writing Challenge
By Bernardus Ari Kuncoro
In Supply Chain Subdivision
In commerce, a supply chain is a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in supplying a product or service to a consumer. (Wikipedia)
To supply a good or service to a consumer, procurement and logistics must be provided. To ease the accounting, most of the time procurement activities are included in Finance, instead.
a. Supply Chain Planning
The goal of planning in supply chain is to make sure that the goods are well delivered in a good condition and timely manner. But due to big data with 4V characteristics, the problems are complex and can be derived into the following challenges that data science can solve.
- Making the supply chain greener to minimize the environmental impact of global sourcing (e.g., shorter distances or consolidated shipments)
- Increasing visibility into the supply chain and response time (e.g., through blockchain)
- Adapting to demographic changes and customer expectations (e.g., free same day deliveries)
- Allowing manufacturers to decrease their product life-cycle times (e.g., through better market insights and smart sourcing) to react to trends and demand more quickly
- Increasing the product portfolio to serve not only the mass market but the entire demand curve (e.g., through mass-customization)
(source: Here)
b. Capacity and Inventory Planning
Most of the time, manufacturing company that utilize warehouse, they need to perform capacity and inventory planning. The idea is simple. Making sure that the flow of goods are in control based on demand and production. They will distribute based on the forecasting of goods, hence consumers are happy. They can buy and get the product in desired time.
The challenges of capacity and inventory planning are optimizing the interval of 80 – 90% capacity.
Interested in digging up this case? Find the sample MIT thesis of Raytheon’s Circuit Card Assembly (CCA) factory here.
To be continued
Kalideres, 16 July 2021