Once again, I hand over my blog to this guy who kind of looks like me
and knows a great deal about benchmarking and supply chains. I sometimes wonder
how my parents raised two geniuses? Here is my brother, and the Executive
Director of Tompkins Supply Chain Consortium, Bruce
Tompkins, with his perspective on demand-driven supply chains.
The concept of a demand-driven process seems clear enough
and makes sense to me as an old lean manufacturing and pull system guy. So I’m
not going to write another article expounding the virtues of being
demand-driven, and I am certainly not going to attempt to tell anyone how to
become demand-driven.
That is a job for your supply chain team and some technology
folks to figure out.
But this does not stop me from sharing my ideas (this runs
in my family, by the way). Like most processes and solutions, demand-driven requires
a toolset that is company-specific.
I have been thinking about this recently and would like to
share a real-life experience that occurred this past weekend. The experience
has cemented in my mind and explains what demand-driven can mean to a company.
I’ll give you the short version: Over the weekend, I was
traveling with some folks to a nearby city. Although we weren’t going very far,
we were not familiar with the territory. But, luckily, my companions had a GPS
device to help navigate in and around town.
Without the GPS to keep us on track and continuously let us
know how we were progressing, we would have wasted considerable time, energy
and money getting to our intended location.
The GPS acted like a demand sensing tool, providing us with
real-time information when we accidentally got off track and giving us very
helpful tips about the road ahead. At that point, a light blub went off and it
occurred to me just how much being demand-driven is like navigating with a GPS
device.
Of course, there are many kinds of GPS devices: some new and
state-of-the-art, some old and slow, and some look a lot like a map. So it is
important to choose your demand-driven GPS wisely. And it follows that you
should choose your demand-driven supply chain experts wisely.
How do you view demand-driven in your company’s supply
chain? Are you there yet?
Bruce
More Resources
Banish
Forecasting Errors, Overstocks, and High Logistics Costs with the Magic Wand of
Supply Chain Transformation
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to View the Tompkins Supply Chaincast On-Demand: The Latest in S&OP:
Demand-Driven Processes
Photo Credit: Amy Guth