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Branch news: Thames Valley - Latest Thinking in Demand Management - Demand management Article
The article entitled: "Branch news: Thames Valley - Latest Thinking in Demand Management" is in the Demand management Articles section of Operations Management Papers area...
ARTICLE DESCRIPTION: Our speaker had had a tough day at the office of two different customers. He was thirsty, so he ordered a pint to relieve his thirst. He was hungry, so he ordered a sandwich. “We can only do plain cheese, sir”, said the hotel waiter. “That will do fine”, said our speaker.
MORE INFO: Branch news: Thames Valley - Latest Thinking in Demand Management Our speaker had had a tough day at the office of two different customers. He was thirsty, so he ordered a pint to relieve his thirst. He was hungry, so he ordered a sandwich. “We can only do plain cheese, sir”, said the hotel waiter. “That will do fine”, said our speaker. Five minutes later, a ham and cheese sandwich arrived! Did that delight the customer? Or perhaps the customer did not eat pork? What an introduction to a talk on Demand Management! Derek Thomason did an excellent job of introducing about 15 of us to the subject of Demand Management. All the other topics in ERP and Supply Chain may have been flogged to death, but now, belatedly, people are beginning to tackle something that seems to have been left to the end – the matter of managing the demand that our plants have to satisfy, on-time, in full, every day. Derek had more war stories to the minute than most other presenters! After giving us a short history of his career, he defined Demand Management to be “..profitably meeting customer demand while ensuring service and quality ..”. He suggested this must be tackled at three levels – strategic, tactical, and operational. At a strategic level, organisations must manage total demand while they acquire new infrastructure, technology, or skills. At the tactical level the aim is to align resources to enhance customer value in the most profitable way. Operational Demand Management aims to provide reliable delivery performance within supply constraints. There are four components of demand management – demand creation, demand communication, supply planning and order management. These are usually associated with the operational level, but may be equally well applied to the strategic and tactical levels. Derek proposed that the pre-requisite of effective demand management is an in-depth understanding of 3 critical parameters – supply chain cost and customer/product profitability, the customer value proposition and the horizon over which demand must be managed. He also introduced us to the idea of “competitive space” – understanding a holistic process to define supply chain positioning. Each business consists of a set of capabilities (processes, skills, technologies, products and relationships) that defines its competitive space. This has been defined in four dimensions. Derek gave us many practical stories of how a number of companies have addressed many of the issues that he discussed. The case studies within his talk provided a ring of truth to everything that he proposed and I think we all went away resolving that we had much to do to better address demand management. Our thanks to Derek for an excellent talk and to EEF South for sponsoring the event. Robin Goodfellow , FIOM Manufacturing Business Excellence
PUBLISHER: Institute of Operations Management
Page number: 7 Word count: 455
Vol 31 - No 01 - February 2005
The article can be downloaded in full from the publisher's site i.e. the Institute of Operations Management.
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