“For distribution-intensive industries, transportation optimization and inventory deployment were regarded as the two areas where Supply Chain Optimization would be most effective” wrote Janet Suleski from AMR in Perspectives on Optimization. Due to the credit crisis and rise in oil prices, this is even more relevant today as companies are forced to look internally for working capital. While [...]
ILOG SCM: Product Flow Optimization - Trading Off Logistics vs. Inventory Costs
Posted by Ronan O’Donovan on November 25th, 2008ILOG SCM: The Economist on Managing in the Downturn and What the Supply Chain Professional Can Do
Posted by Mike Watson on November 23rd, 2008The cover story in this week’s (Nov 22-28, 2008) The Economist is titled “All You Need is Cash: Managing in the Downturn.” The two articles (pg 17 and 79-81) stress that today’s managers will be tested by their ability to manage their cash.
The article covers all types of strategies that firms are pursuing to generate cash including [...]
ILOG: Revisit Supply Chain Efficiency During the Economic Downturn
Posted by Edith Simchi-Levi on November 19th, 2008The current economic environment is extremely stressful and unpleasant for most businesses as they see the demand for their products and services decrease. However, you can also see this is as an opportunity to think in new ways and make much needed changes to vital operations practices that may not have seemed too urgent to [...]
ILOG releases Transportation Analyst 2.0
Posted by Derek Nelson on November 18th, 2008Today ILOG has announced the release of Transportation Analyst 2.0.
Transportation Analyst is an exciting new product to help companies make better strategic transportation decisions. TA can help with such such questions as deciding the proper size of a private fleet, designing dedicated multi-stop routes, allocating shipments to private fleet, commercial TL, and LTL, how to [...]
ILOG LogicNet Plus Modeling Tip: Currency Exchange Modeling
Posted by Jay Jayaraman on November 13th, 2008As many of you may have noticed, the US Dollar has recently grown stronger against Euro and other currencies (as of Nov 11, 1 EUR = 1.25 USD as opposed to 1.75 USD from several months ago). In a complex global supply chain, this is just one of many other factors that impact overall sourcing/manufacturing [...]
ILOG: The value of flexibility and reliability in manufacturing planning and scheduling
Posted by Filippo Focacci on November 12th, 2008In many cases, companies plan and schedule finished product (FP) only. Sometimes this is perfectly fine as filling and packaging lines are the clear bottleneck and intermediate product (IP) schedules can easily be deduced by the FP schedule.
But often this is not the case and doing a good job in synchronizing IP and FP is [...]
LogicNet Plus Modeling Tip: Geocoding International Locations
Posted by Ganesh Ramakrishna on November 5th, 2008Anyone who has worked on network design projects focusing on networks outside North America will tell you that geocoding international locations is a slow and painful multi-step process. The main pain point being multiple spellings for the same city/state name. Is it ‘Bangalore’ or ‘Bengaluru’? Does your data read ‘Kaapstad’ instead of ‘Capetown’ (Kaapstad [...]
ILOG: Strategic supply chain planning with imperfect data
Posted by Derek Nelson on October 28th, 2008Working with many companies over the years in a variety of industries, the one constant is that every company has issues with data collection and data validity. First, it can be very difficult to find sources for all of the relevant data needed for supply chain planning. Second, once a source of data is found, [...]
Accenture-ILOG Webcast: Past the Tipping Point: Record Oil Prices Require New Supply Chain Strategies
Posted by Aimee Ortiz on October 24th, 2008Accenture and ILOG will host the 4th in a series of collaborative webcasts on green logistics and sustainability issues. Previous webcasts focused on carbon footprint reduction initiatives and best practices. The November 3rd webcast will bring an additional level of complexity to the mix: fuel price. This webcast is based on the September 22, 2008 [...]
ILOG: Improving Plant Performance Through Better Synchronization Between Engineering and Manufacturing
Posted by Aimee Ortiz on October 24th, 2008The benefits of a strong collaboration between design and manufacturing operations are well known. Lower material costs and better use of capacities, improved planning of plant upgrades, are just a few benefits of a stronger coordination between the engineering groups and manufacturing groups.
Factory scheduling is one of the areas where this [...]