Demand-Driven Inventory Optimization and Replenishment: Creating a More Efficient Supply Chain

About the Author

Over the past 35 years I have had a unique practitioner's view into inventory and replenishment optimization. This pathway has led me from humble purchasing, to an eye-opening supply chain cost analysis career, to, finally, helping some of the largest companies in the world drive huge inefficiencies out of their supply chains.

Starting in the mid-1980s, while working as a key account manager for a large grocery manufacturer, a harried, overworked co-op wholesale buyer asked me take over the purchasing of my own products as a way of lightening her load. That's right. I was a practicing vendor-managed inventory (VMI) manager 20 years before it was in vogue. Over the next three years, I was able to learn all of the tricks of the replenishment trade and balanced my selfish vendor goals with some of the highest inventory turns in the company. Three times, I was asked to join the staff as a full-fledged buyer, but felt my skills were better served in sales and business management. However, that grounding in replenishment and the fascination with supply chain relationships continued to tug at me until 2000.

Efficient consumer response (ECR) and its stepchild, collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR), were sweeping through forward-thinking supply chain companies in the late 1990s, and I was able to immerse myself in those movements with my efforts as product manager for an award winning solution called value chain analytics (VCA). ECR Europe had just ...