Several important points made by Dr. Meinolf Sellmann:
- We have to do better than saying, “Make your best forecast, and then we plan for that.” This is a bit hard to grasp at first, but the issue is that plans that are optimal for a specific future are frequently a disaster for futures that deviate only slightly.
- This is the real reason why optimization has such a hard time in supply chain planning and why its impact is so very limited in practice. Because it assumes that forecasts were 100% accurate, and that is simply not the case.
- Is there a holy grail? No. It will always be hard to run your business in the face of uncertainty that cannot be magically predicted or defined away. But there is a way for you to run your business and your operations in a data-driven fashion that will give you an edge over your competition.
- Create a model that allows you to optimize your decisions so that the suggestions from the solver will work efficiently and resiliently for a big probability mass of futures and not just the point-predicted future. Link