Daniel Stanton

Supply chain careers and job titles can be confusing, because supply chain management is a relatively new field. (The term supply chain has been around only since the 1980s.) Many supply chain jobs are evolving so quickly that the government agencies that track employment data have a hard time keeping up. Staying up to date with new job titles is a little bit easier for companies because they can change job titles fairly easily, without a lot of red tape.

The process of making anything starts when you decide what to make, how much to make, and when to make it. In a manufacturing company, this process is (conveniently) called production planning and scheduling. Service companies often make life more complicated by finding creative names for this process, but most of them sound a lot like “service planning and scheduling.

Three words — correlation, causation, and interpolation — are key to almost everything that happens in supply chain analytics. If you understand what they mean and how to use them, the rest of analytics is a breeze.Correlation and causation are closely related. Correlation means that two variables are connected in some way.

These days, it’s hard to find a supply chain process that isn’t tied to a piece of software. You can’t place an order, make a phone call, or move a box without logging a transaction in one or more systems. But processes don’t become automated instantly; they need to evolve.An approach that tracks the evolution of a process or the software that supports that process is the capability maturity model (CMM).

In virtually every supply chain, gaps exist between when something is made and when a customer is ready to buy or receive it. Those gaps mean that products end up sitting around. The problem is that someone owns those products and has money tied up in them. In addition, someone needs to keep track of where those products are and protect them from damage (and perhaps even theft).

Managing your supply chain always comes with risk. If you hope to mitigate those successfully, you’ll need to understand the risks you may be facing. Use this guide to identify, classify, and score risk in your supply chain. Identifying risks in the supply chain The first step in managing risks in a supply chain is identifying them.

Supply chain plans are built on assumptions about what will happen in the future, and these assumptions are usually based on past experience. In any event, it’s a good idea to have a supply chain plan for difficult times. ©Shutterstock/Wright StudioFor example, if the transit time between one of your suppliers and one of your factories has always been 15 days in the past then you would assume that the transit time will be 15 days for future orders, too.