Please find our professional articles on this page. Each article was published in relevant journals and deals with important aspects of the optimization of logistics.
What must be adjusted on your ERP system to keep the inventory low, while keeping and ensuring a high service level ? What are planning parameters? How do forecast markets work? Are they truly helpful in forecasting your need for materials for the coming week and months?
Si une société produit à la limite de sa capacité elle va créer de façon continuelle une série de tensions entre les exigences des ventes et les possibilités de la production. La tâche d’un « Sales & Operations Planning » est de mieux balancer ces exigences et de trouver le meil-leur compromis possible entre les limites acceptables de chaque département. Basé sur un extrait condensés de nombreux projets, nous vous proposons 21 astuces pour l’implémentation du « Sales & Operations Planning » ou S&OP. Ces astuces vont vous aider dans la construction efficace et peu coûteuse du procédé.
La mise en œuvre d’une entreprise 4.0 nécessite aussi une « Dispo 4.0 ». Nous allons vous en présenter les raisons et vous expliquer la signification de « Dispo 4.0 ». Nous allons voir que la « Dispo 4.0 » n’est pas une vision mais bien une réalité pour les entreprises à la pointe de la technologie.
Long replenishment time and purchasing restrictions such as container completion are a constant challenge in planning. Combined with an enormous variety of changes in the range of goods plus fluctuation in amounts and schedules of demands, this will quickly lead to overstocking or low delivery readiness, when managed in mainly manual planning processes. The trading company Gremlin Electronics Inc.*) in Great Britain has accepted this challenge and reduced stock while raising delivery readiness in the face of slow purchasing and highly fluctuating demands. With the help of some consultancy advice and the application of an APS system, demand planning and material planning improved significantly alongside with IT support.
Implementation of a factory 4.0 concept in the plastics processing industry requires “scheduling 4.0”. Two management experts explain that this term does not just describe a vision but is already a reality at a well-known injection molder of pond accessories. In the best case, the extra revenue from this essential exercise can finance a company’s own 4.0 strategy.
The stock market demonstrates how it works: Supply and demand dictate the price. But can the forces which apply to stock exchange be applied to demand forecasts? Could it be possible to produce much more in syncronism with the market?
The perfect material planning has two goals: it is supposed to maintain the demanded readiness for delivery and keep stocks as low as possible at the same time. As stock lists usually contain many thousands of items, keeping every single forecast and planning parameter up to date and optimised is beyond the ERP systems settings and even beyond the material planners experience. Depinding on the ERP system, each item has between 30 and 130 of these parameters. Configuring them according to the numerous, company specific influences and dependences requires expert knowledge and mathematically exact forecasts.
Are my stocks too high? How much could we reduce stocks and still keep up our readiness for delivery? Will hiring external specialists be profitable? These and similar questions are surely familiar. The E:S:A – Excess Stock Assessment developed by Abels & Kemmner can answer these questions precisely, comfortably and quickly, basing on item specific data.
Your average material planner has to take care of from 100.000 up to one million bits of data – and keep them up to date as well. Which means, there is more data for him to keep accurate than he has minutes of work time in an entire year! For that reason, A&K’s CEO Dr. Bernd Reineke has developed a simple plan, containing eight steps, to readjust things and make planning and scheduling more comfortable.
Stocks generate costs. They also offer safety. But how much safety stock do you need to keep your company from harmfully high or low stock levels? Most companies have the wrong safety stocks in the wrong places – and thus too much stock in total.
If you total storage costs, you are paying 19 to 30 percent of stock value each year for stockkeeping. Which means, reducing your stocks by 20 percent will increase liquidity by 49 percent in the average. We think, these figures are quite impressive and believe, you will think so, too – especially if you are planning on asking your bank for another loan. In this article, Prof. Dr. Kemmner will give you 13 hints which might help you to identify excess stock in your company and release funds by decreasing stocks.
Prof. H.-P. Wiendahl’s statement “Production is a process which cannot be planned in detail” is just as much set in stone as is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for quantum physics. With simple words, Prof. Dr. Kemmner will explain, how these theories effect the optimisation of process control.
Lot size optimisation is one of the favourite topics of dissertations. And yet more concepts for and dissertations about the determination of correct lot sizes appear, proving that there is apparently a need for more theories about lot size optimisation. Prof. Dr. Kemmner explains the most recent theories in this professional article.
Finally demands boom – and then the readiness for delivery fails! Does it take a more visible sign of too many companies relying on imperfect demand forecasts? Companys which work with more precise forecasts, in contrast, were able to react much faster to recession as well as the booming market.
Material planning’s and process controlling’s meaning for your company may be best analogized by your body’s heart: They ‘keep pumping’ value and material streams through the entire company’s supply chain. Yet management often shows so little concern for these important tasks, they do not even notice the cardiovascular problems their company has. There are several basic principles, however, which may help to stimulate the commercial circulation.
In projects concerning stock optimisation, the subject of material efficiency is often neglected due to the massive effort that comes with it. Yet, making material efficiency part of the project helps with doing more of the right thing at once.