This past summer Chad Smith, a Supply Chain expert and co-founder of the Demand Driven Institute presented a webinar with Ultriva about consumption-based replenishment.  Smith is the co-author of Orlicky’s Material Requirements Planning, third edition (ISBN 978-07-175563-4) who suggested, “A solution must be deployed that allows companies to plan effectively while maintaining or increasing flexibility.  Most global manufacturers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies and manufacturing consultants seem to ignore the obvious path….Instead, the most common approach is to chase symptoms and propose incomplete and even disastrous solutions that either overcomplicate or oversimplify planning, execution, and control systems with less than desirable results.”

This past summer Chad Smith, a Supply Chain expert and co-founder of the Demand Driven Institute presented a webinar with Ultriva about consumption-based replenishment.  Smith is the co-author of Orlicky’s Material Requirements Planning, third edition (ISBN 978-07-175563-4) who suggested, “Many manufacturers and supply chains face a huge dilemma related to their operational strategy and tactics.  To put it bluntly, the world of ‘push and promote’ is dead.  Gone are the days when a company could use the past to predict the future, build products to that forecast, and have any hope that the market would want what they produced.  Companies that continue in this mode will see continual erosion in their market share and bottom-line performance until that company simply goes out of business.  Additionally, rules and tools that were developed under those conditions must be reexamined and rebuilt for the circumstance of today.”

Last week I shared the insights of a CEO using Demand Driven Supply Chain methodologies profiled Chad Smith in Demand Driven Performance – Using Smart Metrics (Smith and Smith, McGraw-Hill, 2013). Smith is a co-founder and Partner at the Demand Driven Institute, an organization dedicated to proliferating demand driven methods globally. Smith serves as the Program Director of the International Supply Chain Education Alliance’s Certified Demand Driven Planner (CDDP) Program. Two months ago Chad Smith and I (Ultriva founder, Narayan Laksham) discussed the five components of DDMRP (Demand Driven Materials Resource Planning) at a well-attended webinar.    

Two months ago Chad Smith and I (Ultriva founder, Narayan Laksham) discussed the five components of DDMRP (Demand Driven Materials Resource Planning) at a well-attended webinar.  Wanted to take this blog as an opportunity to dig a little deeper.  Smith is the co-author of Demand Driven Performance – Using Smart Metrics (Smith and Smith, McGraw-Hill, 2013). He is a co-founder and Partner at the Demand Driven Institute, an organization dedicated to proliferating demand driven methods globally.  Smith serves as the Program Director of the International Supply Chain Education Alliance’s Certified Demand Driven Planner (CDDP) Program. 

Inventory health can be deeply impacted as day-to-day manufacturing operations involve thousands of transactions being processed. When system updates from enterprise resource planning (ERP) system do not happen on a real time basis the results often lead to inventory discrepancies. Even daily reconciliation of all transactions may allow for merely adequate results. 

Chad Smith is the co-author of the third edition of Orlicky’s Material Requirements Planning 3/E (Ptak and Smith, McGraw-Hill, 2011) and the co-author of Demand Driven Performance – Using Smart Metrics (Smith and Smith, McGraw-Hill, 2013). He is a co-founder and Partner at the Demand Driven Institute, an organization dedicated to proliferating demand driven methods globally.  Smith serves as the Program Director of the International Supply Chain Education Alliance’s Certified Demand Driven Planner (CDDP) Program.  Clients, past and present, include Unilever, LeTourneau Technologies, Boeing, Intel, Erickson Air-Crane, Siemens, IBM, The Charles Machine Works (Ditch Witch) and Oregon Freeze Dry.  Chad is also a certified expert in all disciplines of the Theory of Constraints studying directly under the tutelage of the late Dr. Eli Goldratt. 

Living in a world of speed, immediate accessibility, and instant gratification, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers have to procure raw materials, build components, assemble finished goods and physically ship them across the world. Challenged with shorter lead times and exploding finished goods SKUs, selling goods and procuring materials globally increase pressure to do more with less.