For residents and tourists of Paris (France), using RER or Paris Metro is certainly a way to save on commuting costs (and parking frustrations) compared to owning and renting cars. This blog post is not about transportation, but rather about an inventory management method with a similar name.

Namely, this blog post is about RIR or Rapid Inventory Rightsizing, which is an innovative new program to help embattled companies relatively quickly free up cash and reduce the impact of the current global credit crunch on their supply chains. This pretty straightforward concept and message of improving a free cash flow (FCF) came recently from ToolsGroup, a global provider of demand-driven inventory optimization (IO) solutions. Regular readers of this blog site might remember my recent series on shortening long tails of supply chains, where ToolsGroup was also the protagonist. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series explained ToolsGroup’s value proposition for achieving service level excellence in distribution environments. The point of the Service Optimizer 99+ (SO99+) suite’s name is that a “99+ percentage” represents the gold standard in customer service levels, and it takes a product purposely built to achieve service level excellence and to support such a high standard.

ToolsGroup’s latest version of software continues to build on the functionality needed to reach this goal.

Back to Mitigating Long Tails

Having put the necessary pieces in place, over the past year ToolsGroup has turned a particularly keen eye toward how to succeed in environments with a “long tail” demand. The long tail theory originally held that in an environment such as the Internet-based retailers (so called “e-tailers”), which is less affected by physical manufacturing, product and distribution constraints than so-called “brick-and-mortar” retailers, demand will spread across a huge array of items (a.k.a., stock-keeping units or SKUs). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series introduced the notion of long tails in modern supply chains. That blog post also introduced the vendor ToolsGroup and its solution for planning and optimizing finished goods in distribution environments.

So, How Does ToolsGroup Solve the Distribution Puzzle?

Most of the benefits are driven here by the distinctive Stock Mix Optimization capability that has delivered higher service levels with much less inventory for ToolsGroup customers. As its name suggests, the feature is used to define and manage the right mix at each location in the supply network to deliver the targeted customer service level. Read the rest of this entry »

As a little kid growing up in former (and erstwhile happy) Yugoslavia and watching my elders, day in, day out, downing dozens of strong Turkish coffees with their neighbors and relatives (while discussing sports, weather, world politics, and the neighborhood gossip) I would sometimes naively ask for a sip of coffee. The deterring line (a bogey-man tale) from my folks would be that “kids that drink coffee end up with a tail on their rear side.”

A few decades later (being currently admittedly addicted to Starbucks triple-shot espresso drinks), it appears that modern supply chains suffer from long tails, albeit not due to anyone’s premature coffee consumption. That (and much more) was the enlightening conclusion of the recent Webcast entitled “Long Tails and Optimizing Inventories” conducted jointly by AMR Research, ToolsGroup, and Supply Chain Digest. Read the rest of this entry »