I’ve spent over 30 years working and consulting in the supply chain across a variety of industries. During that time I’ve met a lot of smart, well educated people — many with MBA’s, and many in senior roles — who find themselves tasked with managing some aspect of the supply chain, but who lack key insights as to how supply chains work and how they impact the financials of an enterprise.  This site is dedicated to helping those people, friends, students, and clients, by providing those insights in easily digestible bites

 

A supply chain is a system, and the various pieces and players interact in predictable ways.  There is a certain ‘physics’ to the supply chain. As such there are quantifiable mathematical relationships that predict the performance limits of the supply chain and how it will respond to both management action and external factors. Many operations classes try to teach some of this math, and in my experience, students in these courses come away knowing the math but missing the bigger picture — the fundamental insights that the math can give them.  My goal here is to provide the insights with just enough math to help you understand the relationships and a bit of why they hold.

 

Another thing often lacking in academic approaches to supply chain management is the practical details.  It’s great to be able to solve a problem when given the inputs, but where do you find that information in the real world?  How do things really operate without all of the simplifying assumptions?  And how does all of this relate to the company profit and loss statement and balance sheet?  I hope to answer many of those questions as well to make this site a practical resource for those of you that work in the supply chain every day.

 

I hope you find this information useful.  If so, please leave a comment.  If you think I left something out or you have a topic you would like me to write about, please comment on that as well.