Tag: inventory management
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What Shape Is Your Plant? In Two of the Four, Your Bottleneck Lies
Every factory game teaches you the slowest machine sets the pace. None teach you that in a V-plant, the trunk can run at 100% and convert every unit it should, while the customer still goes short.
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Your Supplier Isn’t Offering a Discount. They’re Offering You 29.8%
The price-break EOQ math says buy 600 units instead of 87 and save $6,566 a year. Then a carrying rate above 29.8% flips the answer. Here are the three numbers no supplier quote contains.
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I Let AI Agents Play a 5-Year Beer Game: Why Sharing Data Beat Buying a Smarter Model
I ran the classic Beer Game for 260 weeks with AI agents in the chairs. Giving the chain real customer demand cut in-game cost by up to 40 percent, far more than paying for a smarter model did.
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The Most Expensive Word in Procurement: Minimum
Minimum Order Quantities silently drain working capital across thousands of SKUs. We analyze 30 real-world parts, calculate the true carrying cost of MOQ overbuys, and show three strategies that cut excess inventory by 47% — with R code and an interactive calculator.
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Stop the Madness: Why Your MRP Keeps Changing Its Mind (and How Time Fences Fix It)
Your MRP system reschedules 300 orders before lunch. Your shop floor ignores half of them. Your suppliers stopped trusting your forecasts two quarters ago. Time fences are the fix, and the math shows exactly where to set them.
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The $2,700 Post-It Note: How a 1913 Formula Still Beats Your ERP
A procurement manager discovers she’s been wasting $2,700 per year on a single component — and the fix fits on a Post-it note. We use R to show why a 1913 formula still outperforms gut-feel ordering, when it breaks, and what to do about it.
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The Bullwhip Effect: Why a 10% Demand Blip Becomes a 400% Supply Chain Earthquake
A small wobble in customer demand can snowball into chaos upstream. We quantify the bullwhip effect with R, simulate a 4-tier supply chain, and show why cutting lead time is the single most powerful lever you have.