SM Thacker & Associates

Highlights of our full range of training courses / Workshops:

Lean & Agile Supply Chain / Inventory Modelling

Lean & Agile Manufacturing Planning & Control

Operations Management / Team Leader Training

Step Change Management / Business Process  Reengineering

Continuous Improvement

Procurement (Purchasing & Supplier Management)

IS / IT / e-commerce

Product Management / New Product Introduction  / Quality  Management

Bookmarks for this topic below:

Our full range of training

Expert Systems / Tools

Relevant Further Reading

Expert Systems / Tools:

15 point self-diagnostic, agile supply chain management, health check

Relevant Further Reading: The following further articles were mentioned in this paper:

a. Permanently Maintained Website Articles:

Materials Management & Stock Control)

Lean & Agile Supply Chain Management

13 principles of lean and agile supply chains

b. Previously Featured Articles from our Archives (Up to 2 per organisation available on request):

Previous Best Practices:

Previous Techniques:

Previous Questions:

Previous Malpractices:

Training Courses & Workshops to support

Lean & Agile Supply Chain Management

Our Training Philosophy and Approach

The following 8 training courses are available (linked to highlights below). They can be readily tailored to suit individual requirements for in-house workshops.

SSC01 Tools, Techniques & Modern Trends In Supply Chain Management

(1 day) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Managers and planners, responsible for supply chain management, demand management, production planning, procurement planning, or stock control

Course Objectives:

Good supply chain performance is essential in times of financial constraints and the unwillingness of your customers to hold stock.

This unique course provides 15 tools & techniques for understanding, resolving the issues, designing and implementing better supply chain management processes & an overview of 33 modern trends and innovations in supply chain management. It aims to:

• Explode the myths, conventional wisdom and traditional approaches to managing stock levels and customer service
• Provide a deeper understanding of the issues affecting supply chain performance
• Create an action plan for the implementation of improvements

Course Highlights:

• This course will show you how to:
• Devise a supply chain management strategy which delivers superior customer service, reduced operating costs and working capital simultaneously
  • Identify supply chain complexity and inflexibility
  • Analyse your supply chain from your customer's viewpoint & identify "value streams"
  • Identify the ten essential ingredients of adding value (& which of these you need to improve)
  • Identify the six essential ingredients of supply chain management control systems (& which of these you need to improve)
• Recognise 33 recent trends and innovations to enable you to deliver superior supply chain performance in:
  • Logistics
  • Procurement
  • Communications and Information Technology
• Stimulate & drive ongoing supply chain improvement
• And finally answer the age old question, "what should the batch size be?"

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Informative, educational and challenging"
• "Very worthwhile - You'll wish you did it years ago!"
• "Very in-depth"
• "Theories explained in such a way that I can readily apply them in my day-to-day role"
• "I enjoyed the course & the examples were very helpful"
• "All the practical examples & sharing of experiences were really useful"

Notes: Includes our unique, 15 point self-diagnostic, agile supply chain management, health check to determine your development needs.

SSC02 Materials Control Process Selection

(1 day) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Planning & Control systems designers, implementation project teams and supply chain management or materials management personnel, and anyone wishing for an appreciation of the control systems options available.

Course Objectives:

Selecting the most appropriate control system for your situation, will probably be the most important operations decision you make in the next decade. Getting impartial advice is not only difficult, but often costly. However the cost of making the wrong decision is even greater!

• This course uniquely provides a balanced overview of, and selection criteria for, the 14 push / pull, material planning and control systems available.
• It also provides a rationale for choosing which control system to adopt.

Course Highlights:

This course will show you how to select appropriate material control systems by explaining:

• What push / pull planning and control processes are available( also see Materials Management & Stock Control)?
  • Push systems covered: MRP1 (Firm & Advisory Schedules); MRP2; APS; Drum, Buffer, Rope (TOC); Projects; Period Batch Control (PBC); All time buy.
  • Pull systems covered: Replacement; 2 Bin; 3 Bin; Re-order Point, Kanban 1 card / 2 card / Top up point of use; Input / Output control / CONWIP.
• What are their key features?
• What are their strengths and weakness?
• How to avoid the terrible costs & risks (customer service, financial, business continuity) of choosing the wrong one.
• Which are appropriate in your circumstances and therefore likely to deliver bottom line benefits and be easier to implement?

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "A well constructed informative overview of the various aspects of materials management in today's industry"
• "Gave me greater understanding of how to analyse & solve the problems we face"
• "Enjoyable & very informative insight into the benefits of Kanban systems"
• "Very worthwhile - I have taken a lot of ideas away with me"
• "Introduced new concepts  Very useful"
• "Fresh, exiting and a real idea inspiring course"
• "Good overview of material, planning and stock control systems"
• "Enjoyable, practical, easy to use"

Notes:

1. Includes a copy of our unique, control systems selector, (based on our 3 year research project in conjunction with the Universities of Manchester and Bradford) to enable you to match the ideal application to your environment.
2. This course is in fact day 2 of our 3 day course "M24 Materials Management & Stock Control".
3. Many of the control systems contained in this course, are also covered in detail (to control system design, implementation and practitioner level) in other courses. (See highlights of our full range above.)
4. Also includes overviews of complementary processes including: Consignment stocks; Outsourced Warehousing; 3rd Party Kitting; Milk round; Visual control systems; The use of bar code reading / RFID in stock movement; Electronic Data Interchange (EDI); The use of "Back-flushing" techniques in MRP systems; ERP systems.

SSC03 Advanced Forecasting & Inventory Modelling using Spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel®)

(3 days) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Supply Chain Management, Sales Forecasting, / Demand Management, Inventory Planning & Purchasing staff

Course Objectives:

Having the right stock in the correct amounts is vital, but how do you ensure that both of the potentially conflicting requirements of customer service AND financial prudence can be satisfied?

We confidently expect you to achieve a dramatic improvement in customer service & / or reduction in inventory / obsolescence by right-sizing your stock levels and focusing on the issues highlighted using these methods.

One of our course participants reduced stocks by 15% and increased first time pick rates from 55% to 95% simultaneously within 6 months & then went on to reduce inventory by a further £1.1m.

This hands-on, detailed, course, written in conjunction with SSC05 Producing Accurate Forecasts (below), is focused on the theory, mathematics and practical application of forecasting techniques, inventory strategy, & inventory modelling, providing:

• An ability to dynamically select the best forecast from one of the 6 following models based on the attributes of individual item’s historical demand:
• Moving average; Trend; Seasonal; Seasonal with Trend; Low volume & infrequent demand (in extremis to recommend catalogue / de-listing of items); Erratic (requiring manual intervention by exception)
• The ability to develop inventory strategies, evaluate the benefits of alternative strategies & simulate your proposals to provide secure & predictable outcomes in terms of customer service levels; inventory values; workloads / traffic movements; space requirements; long term cash forecasts & obsolescence prediction
• The ability to modify your proposals by constraints such as shelf life, minimum order quantities, container size & space. Then highlight where these are unduly influencing the recommendations
• A robust, re-usable and fully documented Excel template, which incorporates this theory, for you to take away to get you started quickly on right-sizing your stock levels

Course Highlights:

This course, containing 34 practical exercises will show you how to:

• Day 1:
  • Create a rationale & a method of creating robust & reusable forecast models;
  • Understand what data you need;
  • Dynamically identify suspect data;
  • Forecast using:
    • Moving average;
    • Trend;
    • Seasonal;
    • Seasonal with Trend models.
• Day 2:
  • Forecast low volume and infrequent demands and make more accurate catalogue / de-list decisions;
  • Select the most reliable forecast model dynamically (and reject unsuitable models, challenge faulty forecasts and unsubstantiated assertions);
  • Report erratic demand where manual intervention is required;
  • Set and implement inventory strategy (Reducing stock value, obsolescence risk, workload, & the need to forecast, simultaneously);
  • Set stock Levels using classic Reorder Point methods & then understand why this is not universally applicable;
  • Conduct Pareto / ABC Analysis & lead-time analysis.
• Day 3:
  • Adjust you results for Shelf life; Minimum order quantity; Container size;
  • Identify unresolved conflicts & produce exception reports;
  • Evaluate & sell your proposed changes and make long term cash & obsolescence forecasts;
  • Simulate alternative strategies and avoid nervous schedules;
  • Output your forecasts & planning parameters to drive your stock management systems, such as Reorder Point (max / min) type stock control systems or ERP / MRP planning systems in order to implement inventory strategy;
  • Create your own model;

To do all this with mathematical integrity within the framework of inexpensive, easy to maintain, MS Excel models for up to 65,000 items.

Or to answer the questions we posed at the beginning, "What is the best forecast and right-sized Inventory level? How can I prove it, and where are the issues I need to focus on?"

Notes:

1. Due to the hands-on nature of this course we only allow a maximum of six participants per course, so early booking is recommended!
2. Requires a good knowledge of algebra & use of formulae in MS Excel. (We will send you a sample of the sort of data and Excel formulae we use, well before the course to help you prepare.) (No programming or Macros are used in the course.)
3. Written in conjunction with, and provides complementary material to, our training course SSC05 Producing Accurate Forecasts (below), which focuses on forecasting as a business process.

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "A very comprehensive view of inventory management that can actually be applied in practice & provide results"
• "Gives me a model to go back to my boss with"
• "A very well run course with a lot of detail"
• "Having the template to take away is most useful"
• "Very thorough, well prepared and well presented"
• "Provided me with a more accurate method of deciding safety stock"

SSC04 Production Planning and Control: Back to Basics

(2 days) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Development or continuous improvement teams and supplier development teams & newcomers to this topic

Course Objectives:

Adding complexity in order to manage operations is not the answer.

You need simple ways of achieving operations objectives, for three reasons:

• They are usually more effective
• They are less costly
• They are more durable

This overview, entry-level course, draws on key points, highlights and conclusions of the basics and simple methods of production planning and control from a number of our other courses to enable you to understand and diagnose problems in your own processes (or for use in supplier development situations) by:

• Presenting a balanced view of Production Planning & Control needs & processes Identifying common causes of production management problems
• Providing our unique, 175 point Production Planning & Control self-diagnostic health check, which you should be able to complete following the course to determine your development needs (or your supplier's).

Course Highlights:

This course will show you how to:

• Re-examine your control systems needs, avoiding unnecessary complexity;
• Identify the key elements of planning and control needed to manage production;
• Explain the most commonly used, simple methods and their underlying principles;
• Manage demand;
• Manage the production plan;
• Manage the materials plan;
• Control materials with simple visible controls and pull systems;
• Manage the capacity and lead-time;
• Measure success, avoid repeating your mistakes and drive improvement;
• Diagnose problems in production planning and control;
• And last but not least, increase capacity / output for free!
• Includes exercises in:
  • MRP1 simulation;
  • Kanban simulation;
  • 2 bin systems;
  • Visual control systems;
  • Designing and using a loading board;
  • Diagnosing problems (your development checklist).

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Very full content & gave lots of food for thought"
• "A good practical overview of this subject matter in plain English"
• "Very helpful - Gave me new ideas"
• "I must do more work on TAKT time"
• "Problems discussed and solutions suggested"
• "Is going to make me review our Purchasing dept."
• "Whole session thought provoking"
• "Pace good - I have taken a lot of ideas away with me"
• "Will help me implement new working practices"

SSC05 Producing Accurate Forecasts

(1 day) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

All levels of supply chain management, demand analysts, planning, inventory management, sales and purchasing personnel responsible for forecasting and demand management and particularly valuable for newcomers to this topic.

Course Objectives:

Long term business decisions and often contractual obligations have to be based on reliable forecasts. Expensive contingency plans have to be constructed to accommodate forecast error. This course will take you to the next level of improving business decision making and supply chain performance.

This detailed course, written in conjunction with SSC03 Advanced Forecasting & Inventory Modelling (above), is focused on the business processes involved in forecasting. It is designed to benchmark your processes vs. best practice and in particular identify problems causing inaccurate forecasts in order to create a development plan to solve them.

It aims to:

• Identify why your forecast may be wrong (the Traps)
• Identify areas to improve the quality of forecasting
• Outline a best practice process which can produce accurate forecasts
• Provide our unique 59 point forecasting self-diagnostic health check, which you should be able to complete following the course to determine your development needs.

Course Highlights:

This course will show you how to:

• Reduce the need to forecast (in order to focus on the things which do need forecasts);
• Identify why forecasts are wrong (The 10 Traps & 59 sources of forecast error);
• Improve the quality of forecasts (The Key Success Factors);
• Manage demand better;
• Manage seasonal demand;
• Understand the key demand distortions which occur and integrate these into your decision making;
• Identify the role of forecasting in a "Bottom up Development, Sales & Operations Management" process (DS&OM);
• Forecast low volume / infrequent demand items more accurately;
• Avoid the problems caused by inaccurate forecasts;
• Under forecasts: Lost Sales; Missing the Market; Dissatisfied customers; Insufficient resources; Expediting; Back orders; Express freight costs;
• Over forecasts: Under-utilised resource; Spending too early; Using capacity too early; Obsolescence; Out of Shelf Life; Stock Cost / Cash flow!
• Continuously improve the process;
• Make better business decisions!

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Very useful & will result in changes to our demand analysis methods"
• "Made me think differently"
• "Excellent - Very detailed. I need to review the way we work!"
• "An insight into the forecasting process and how to avoid falling into the traps"
• "Outline bottom up planning process and "Pareto" really useful"
• "I have found ways to improve my forecasts and eliminate historical problems"
• "Understanding the pitfalls of forecasting most useful"
• "Prioritised action plans valuable"

SSC06 Warehouse Operations Management

(1 day) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Potential section leaders, warehouse / stores, and work movement control personnel

Course Objectives:

Providing a good service to your customers, with excellent productivity, requires not only good physical organisation but also accurate stock records.

This detailed course aims to show how to manage stock efficiently and accurately, design a stores stock recording process and an action plan for its implementation.

Course Highlights:

This course will show you how to:

• Design an effective stores layout to minimise handling and store stock safely and efficiently
• Design a stores system that keeps track of stock and work in process, accurately
• Set up the stores controls
  • Warehouse operations processes from receipt to despatch
  • Visual controls to make the process simple to maintain and durable
  • Housekeeping to ensure that the things you want can be found and the things you do not want are not in the way
  • Simple, continuous, stock checking (Perpetual Inventory) to prove that your recording disciplines are working and that stock accuracy remains a high priority
• Self-diagnose problems and create an audit checklist to ensure that disciplines are maintained, avoiding the classic warehouse problems of:
  • Not having what you need
  • Not knowing what you have
  • Not knowing the status of what you have
  • Not being able to find it
  • Traffic management and congestion
• Create a task list for the implementation

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Very well run and informative course with a speaker obviously well rehearsed and knowledgeable"
• "Thought provoking, challenging and I am going away with a sense of optimism"
• "Excellent - Well put over"
• "The course was very useful and full of information. Thank you very much."
• "Questions explained and answered fully"
• "Provided ideas and guidance in ways to set up our controls"
• "How the course materials fit in with ERP situations and systems was good"
• "Very impressed with this"
• "The question and answer sessions were valuable"

SSC07 Strategic Supply Chain Management

(2 days) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

Supply chain designers, senior planning / inventory management, managers and team leaders of all parts of the supply chain

Course Objectives:

Leanness without agility leads to shortages. Getting the right goods and services to the point of use to satisfy demand with near-zero stock and near-zero lead-time, requires a radical, holistic and re-engineered, supply chain centred, approach.

Are you ready for this yet?

Particularly applicable to Batch processing, Food, and Fast Moving Consumer Goods industries, this overview course and workshop is designed to explain this message and its principles to all of the links in the supply chain and enable you to contribute to the design, implementation and operation of this integrated, high performance, alternative, namely:

 "A lean and agile supply chain and distribution network"

It rejects:

• mass production principles
• outdated policies such as "Economic Order Quantity"
• ineffective, unstable, "nervous" scheduling systems
• over-complex approaches
• "silo" (local optimums) thinking
• "push" systems

Course Highlights:

This overview course explains how to design, implement and operate the 13 principles of lean and agile supply chains, and construct a task list for implementation. It focuses on the real issues and will show you how to:

• minimise risk and create supply chain resilience
• minimise lead-time and expediting
• maximise responsiveness / product flow
• meet the business plan
• enable good communications
• effectively implement product development initiatives and product changes
• enable marketing initiatives
• improve customer service
• reduce inventory value, obsolescence and out of shelf life problems
• improve production efficiency
• reduce administration costs
• turn your inflexible supply chain into an "agile supply train" and avoid the damaging "Forrester effect" / "Bullwhip Effect" (See Lean & Agile Supply Chains)
• overcome the constraints (performance driven improvements)

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Very good balance of theory and practical exercises"
• "I found getting exposed to other industry practices and finding answers to some of the questions most useful"
• "Very comprehensive"
• "Supply chain measurement and the "Forester Effect" really useful"
• "I now understand the strengths & weakness of our current Supply Chain Management"
• "We need to do Pull system ordering!"
• "I now understand what the safety stock calculation is actually trying to do"
• "Multi-rule ordering methods good"
• "Practical exercises most useful"

SSC08 Participative Development, Sales & Operations Management (DS&OM)

(2 days) (Course schedules), (Request course details)

Designed for:

All stakeholders in the planning process including development, sales, operations, supplies / purchasing managers, and planners

Course objectives:

Selling what you can do? Doing what you can sell? Short development lead-time? Short operational lead-time? Near zero stock? On time In Full? Profitable?

Doing all seven things efficiently and effectively requires and integrated and participative, approach. It is certainly the most important routine decision making process in business.

This detailed course, written in workshop, problem-solving style, will help you to:

• Create a vehicle to deliver the business plan
• Design and implement your own Development, Sales and Operations Management process, which supplies what customers want, when they want them, is reconciled to the business plan and utilises resources effectively:
• Produce a task list for the implementation of a Participative DS&OM process.
• It will show you why "Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)" misses three key aspects of the management of the process, leading to delays and costs

Course Highlights:

The course covers the design of the process & uses a simple capacity model. It will show you how to:

• Manage demand
• Integrate development, sales and operations management into a simple, single, integrated process delivering the business plan
• Design and create a planning process that delivers products on time and at short lead-time, but also manages resources effectively
• Manage seasonal or variable demand and smooth production simply
• Manage the introduction of new products into operations
• Create a simple capacity model and the procedures for maintaining it
• Scheduling strategies which are beneficial and how to design a simple scheduling process
• Avoid scheduling complexity
• Understand how load, capacity and lead-time interact
• Understand the role of Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) in operations planning
• Use "Takt" time to manage demand and minimise surprise demand
• Understand the role of "Takt" time in operations planning
• Quickly check if you have the capacity available to deliver when required and make accurate promises to customers
• Control and balance process capacity
• Implement a Sales & Operations Planning system

Examples of course participant's feedback:

• "Provides a good basic understanding of DS&OM"
• "An enjoyable course"
• "Helped the stakeholders understand their input into the process"
• "To the point"
• "Gave me a different perspective to my role"
• "Gave me an understanding of the importance of a defined process with rules"

Note 1: Includes our MS Excel capacity modelling starter pack to enable you to interpret budgets, forecasts, and your order book into resource / load projections.

Note 2: This course is also available as an in-house workshop. When run with all the stakeholders in the room it produces an outline design and implementation task list.

Note 3: Draws on materials from several of our other courses.

Note 4: This course which is applicable to manufacturing, distribution and service delivery environments assumes an active role in the management of the sales process. Our course M04 Participative Master Production Scheduling assumes a passive role in the Sales Management & Development Management Process (i.e. not Sales / Development Planning) & is confined to manufacturing environments.

You may also be interested in our other courses on the left

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Bookmarks for this topic above:

Our full range of training

Expert Systems / Tools

Relevant Further Reading

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