Remember the old days when we experienced supply shortages? When inventory balances were sometimes inaccurate, and suppliers shipped short or missed due dates?

Our subject matter experts often get asked to speak as guest lecturers at universities to share their knowledge about the service supply chain. We thought it might be good to offer a Service Supply Chain 101 here on our blog for students and those new to this, the “other supply chain.”

Historically, Prophet's legacy reporting did a great job providing users with large exports of detailed data. Users had access to all of the details they needed to create their own pivot tables, charts and graphs to analyze data outside of Prophet.

In this final part of our exploration of total cost optimization, we bring these operational and inventory costs together to show that service level is better viewed as an output of an optimization rather than as a goal, as the right service level minimizes the combination of these costs.

As we continue our exploration of cost optimization, we consider two additional costs that must be balanced in the optimization process: inventory costs and instability costs.

This is part one of a three-part discussion on Total Cost Optimization, Baxter Planning’s unique, proprietary optimization approach to service parts planning.