https://www.lokad.com/resilience-supply-chain - A neat take on the concept of resilience

Last mile delivery services where attaining incredible valuations only a year ago. It seems as the honeymoon phase is over and the reality of a challenging route to profitability of the overall business model is setting in.
The model in itself is not new at all and the service is incredibly desirable from a customer perspective, however, the question remains why the big supermarket giants have not implemented it themselves 10 years ago already - maybe the business model is not as amazing as believed?
Future will tell whether clients will be willing to pay the premiums that the remaining 'monopolists' will have to charge to become profitable.

My personal favorite remains https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/anno/1800.
The entire Anno series is outstanding to understand basic concepts of raw material - semi finished - finished product transition + lead times.
Would be keen to know whether there are other games that come to mind!

Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

The average project completion time is greater than what is predicted by the average durations of the underlying tasks, because the project is not done until the last task is done.

The average profit is less than the profit of the average demand, because there is no upside if demand exceeds quantity ordered.

The average operating cost is greater than the operating cost of the average demand.

A video explaining why this forum was launched.

While Reddit targets a young category of users and Wikipedia is bound to contain old and somewhat deprecated information, LinkedIn remains one of the only trustworthy source of information in the field, due to the experience of the professionals that are sharing their experiences. However, this information does not remain easily accessible after a while. Therefore, it would be interesting to have a place to discuss the specifics of the Supply Chain field.

For this purpose, Lokad has launched a new page called https://news.lokad.com/, an aggregator that consolidates interesting links to various Supply Chain topics and where the community can discuss and submit their own subjects. The final goal is to share links of interest for Supply Chain-minded people, giving them the chance to debate and contribute to further achievements in the field.

Inflation pressure in Europe may not only be fueled by increased energy prices but in addition by increased logistics costs.

It would be cool to have a Lokad version of the beer game. I.e. focusing on the elements of the stock reward function https://docs.lokad.com/library/stock-reward-function/

Interesting, would be cool to have a collection of warehouse visits to give new professionals a better idea of what an actual warehouse looks like. I came across this one from Maersk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhcheew5kxU&ab_channel=Maersk

Interestingly enough the EU exports approximately 7 million metric tons per year https://legacy.trade.gov/steel/countries/pdfs/exports-eu.pdf - which is about 4% of the production - thus the demand/supply gap in Europe shouldn't be too significant in the short term.

EU steel plants suffer from weak demand and high energy costs, decreasing competitiveness of EU steel producers. Shut downs are across all EU countries. However, in comparison to 2022 the steel production is only reduced by 6.7%

Interesting to see that that the major congestions that were deemed to create backlog for all 2022 have mostly vanished

Working in the probabilistic space, it feels that the term is becoming more and more mainstream and anecdotal evidence confirms that. However, looking at google searches this is not at all confirmed. Maybe the topic isn't as mainstream as we feel - confirmation bias? https://www.lokad.com/probabilistic-forecasting

Funfact: Since 2012 the interest for the topic has x 100

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fg%2F11b90fjhmq

Due to spiking electricity prices several stakeholders are arguing that the electricity market is malfunctioning and the pricing mechanism is flawed. The merit order model, that attributes the marginal (highest production price) to all producers is nothing else than the offer/demand model that we apply in all other markets as well.