Supply chain optimization is crucial in an increasingly globalized competitive world where margins are under constant pressure. In the recent decade, most of the attention in supply chain design has been on maximizing resource utilization, offshoring to lower-cost regions, outsourcing non-value added operations, implementing just-in-time systems, and investing in communication technologies. With the rapid expansion of the economy and technology, business competition has morphed into supply chain competition. Supply chain management has sparked public concern due to the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks, pandemics, hurricanes, and other disasters, resulting in lower production, higher costs, rising customer dissatisfaction, and much more.

Join Dr. Christoph Kilger and Dr. Boris Reuter as they discuss the supply chain performance gap, and where you can start closing it. Most businesses collect large amounts of data, yet supply chain analytics doesn't always translate into concrete measures that are executed. How can you start digital execution management that leads to real results?

Our world is changing and becoming increasingly more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). What does this mean for top-performing supply chains? To maintain a sustainable competitive advantage over competitors, they need to excel in three qualities:

• They’re agile and can react speedily to sudden changes in demand or supply.
• They can easily adapt to evolving market structures and strategies.
• They always align the interests of all stakeholders to optimize the chain’s performance while also maximizing each stakeholder’s interests.

Allocation planning plays a key role in these three processes. This detailed guide discusses allocation planning, why it’s important in supply-constrained supply chains, and how it can help supply chains achieve agility, adaptability, and alignment in a challenging post-COVID world.

A digital twin is a highly detailed digital replica of any system that uses comprehensive data to emulate the working of the system at all times. Therefore, a supply chain digital twin is a simulation model of a supply chain. You feed the model real-time data from all sources and systems of the organizations that can exactly work out the effects of macro and micro-changes on the system using advanced analytics and learning models.

Today, I’m talking to Andreas, one of aioneers’ founders and CEO of aioneers Technology. He will tell us more about the what’s and why’s of aioneers. In December we’re taking some time to introduce you to our team, and we’ve been running an advent calendar on social media.

In the last few months, we have seen how important liquidity is: as the COVID-19 crisis hit, a threat to the survival of many companies surfaced within the first few weeks. More than ever, this shows the importance of working capital management as an existential element to the financial health of your business. This article kicks off our series on working capital management. In the next weeks, we will take a deep dive into working capital management and its most important aspects. This week: the impact of economic downturn on working capital management.

As described in my earlier post, many supermarkets around the world experienced shortages of toilet paper due to the Covid-19 induced bullwhip effect. Now, we witnessed the second phase of this phenomenon. As consumers increased the safety stock levels of toilet paper in their homes in order to prevent stockouts – resulting in stockouts on the supermarket shelves – they purchased a lower quantity in the last week.

In the last weeks, toilet paper was short in many supermarkets due to Covid-19. This is a nice example of the dynamics in supply chains, where a small change might lead to tremendous fluctuations of demand and supply.