Over the years, one of the most misunderstood and misused processes I have found in inventory management is Inventory Cycle Counting. Most of the time, people think that instead of having a yearly total physical count, you just break it down into smaller periodic counts. They do the counting and report the differences to Finance. They refer to it as a cycle count. Unfortunately, I have to tell you, that this is a misconception. Inventory Más...

Implementing a Demand Forecasting tool is always a critical task when creating your S&OP process. This is a very laborious activity since it will require going back at least three years in time and reviewing sales history numbers to load that information into the new system. However, the team needs to understand that this is one of those situations where the old saying of “garbage goes in, garbage goes out” is most true. Over the Más...

When I was appointed as the first Production Master Scheduler in my company, during an S&OP implementation project, Rough-cut Capacity Planning was one of the initial tools I was introduced to. It was an easy-to-use tool, straight forward, very helpful and above all, very powerful. It allowed us to identify ahead of time, if certain critical resources could become constraints to our plan in the following months. This information was very valuable in our S&OP Más...

People are our most valuable asset! You have heard this many times, and the truth is that they really are. Without having the right people in your organization, any strategy, process or project would fail. So, you need to make sure that you have the right people in your company and that they behave and make decisions that are aligned with your strategy, day in and day out. Here are some insights on how this Más...

Is it important to align your processes with you company’s strategy? The answer is: of course. However, this is something that for many process owners is difficult to understand and to implement. Also, this answer does not mean that the Purchasing Process will change his objective of “timely providing materials and services required by the different areas of the company”, however, the emphasis or the internal requirements for this process could be impacted by the Más...

Another question that I usually get from my clients is: How do we align our projects with the company’s strategy. Well, I always suggest letting your projects naturally derive from your Strategy. For that, I will give you some tips: Where do we start? By now, you should have defined your Vision (where do you want to be as a company), Mission (how or why you want to be there) and your Corporate Values (what Más...

Whenever starting a strategy definition process for a Company, it is always important to bring about healthy debate to the table, to try to shake a little bit what is taken for granted (paradigms) and to avoid staying still in the status quo. For this, I always use with my clients a couple of Powerful Questions: 1)     In what business are we?2)     What is our value proposition, what do we offer to our customers? In Más...