Articles

Setting Effective Inventory Safety Stock Levels

  • On 02/15/2018
  • inventory, safety stock
The role of safety stock (a.k.a., "minimum inventory levels") and its relationship with demand is commonly misunderstood. A popular intuition is to increase safety stocks whenever an increase in demand is anticipated. However, this misses the point of what safety stock levels should be designed to do.  The use of average expected rates of demand […]
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Deconstructing On-Time Manufacturing Performance

  • On 02/13/2018
  • production control, production scheduling
Far too often, manufacturers find themselves behind the eight ball with deadlines looming on the horizon.  Managers end up relying on overtime to complete and fulfill orders.  In some cases, production schedulers modify their shop calendars to permanently include Saturdays and Sundays as working days.  Capacity planning exercises consistently fail to identify a need for […]
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