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Recently, a series of crises including the COVID-19 pandemic and the obstruction of the Suez Canal had a major impact on the global supply chain, resulting in disruptions such as temporary shortages, delayed deliveries, increased uncertainty, and higher costs for goods and services.

You understand the importance of looking at a myriad of scenarios as part of the supply chain decision-making process, but some of the terms technology vendors use nowadays can be confusing. Good examples are scenario modeling,
what if analysis, and simulation. 
What’s the difference between each approach?

It’s that time again—an opportunity to look back on the past 12 months and ahead to what the new year will bring. You don’t need to be a supply chain expert to know that we still have challenges ahead.

In anticipation of Christmas, we thought we’d have a bit of fun and build a Cosmic Frog supply chain design model to help Santa distribute gifts in the U.S., considering service (on-time gift delivery) and risk (to ensure reliability).

We’ve pulled together the top 11 Cosmic Frog FAQs that get into the nitty gritty of why Cosmic Frog is your new go-to supply chain design tool. Hop in and take a peek!

You’ve heard over and over again that supply chains must be agile and resilient. Every article, blog post, and podcast stresses the importance of mitigating risk and being able to quickly respond to the disruptions that today’s world continues to produce. It’s clear that Risk Management is a hot topic in supply chain management, but companies are often left scratching their heads on how to stay ahead of future risks instead of just reacting to disruptions that can be seen on the horizon.

Many companies are shifting to hyperscale cloud computing for its speed, reduced downtime losses, easier management, and more. Hyperscaling enables users to ask more what-if questions so that they can get more accurate answers, faster. That means more time to actually pinpoint the best strategy that fits your needs, in regards to financials, service, and risk.

While Retailers spend a lot of time building their outbound distribution network, elements of the supply chain like returns, repair, and recycled items are usually not on the radar of the supply chain team. Have you ever been able to return packaging to retailers so they can use the material again? Metrics like contribution to landfill, water resource usage per sku, CO2 contribution per sku, and return cost per sku are usually not top of mind for executives. It’s usually about revenue, new store sales, and margin.

For the last few years, the team at Optilogic has been busy rethinking the approach to Supply Chain Design. As most of the team has been working in this space for the past decade or two (or more for some of us), we’ve been seeing a need to shift how we model supply chains, what metrics are most important, and what technology to use to successfully deploy supply chain models, simulations and optimizations.

OptiCon 2022 was definitely one for the books. We discussed topics ranging from how technology innovation was born, sustained and how Supply Chain Design can be re-imagined by combining optimization, simulation, risk management, and cloud hyper-scaling. In case you missed it, here are a few key takeaways from our supply chain thought leadership conference.