I’m just back from a business trip to Norway and have a very non-technical viewpoint to share today.  : )

Over nearly 25 years in business, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to some interesting international destinations.  I have visited all the continents except Antarctica and I don’t plan to go there anytime soon for supply chain design work!

These years overlap with the years I’ve been raising a family, so most international trips were scheduled to minimize time away from home.  Even when I wanted to take a few extra days, it always seemed to be someone’s birthday, there was a playoff hockey game, or something else the prevented an extended stay.  For many years, people would tell me how cool it was that I travelled overseas.  My standard reply was “I’ve been to some very interesting places and saw nothing but the hotel and the inside of an office building, which looks pretty similar worldwide”.

But over the last couple of years, my attitude on international business travel has changed.  While my standard reply has some truth to it, I’ve realized that working & interacting with people from other countries in their normal environment gives you a view on life in those countries that no tourist excursion can provide.  I haven’t seen all of the tourist sites in the places I’ve visited, but I have learned about the country & the people – what they’re like, how they do business, what their families are like, what they think is funny, what they do on weekends, how the politics work, what holidays they celebrate, what they eat (and don’t, and why), how they get to work, how they like their coffee, etc.  I’ve learned about local customs in the workplace, like offering fresh waffles every Friday afternoon – what’s not to like about that?!

With all this in mind, here are a few ideas to pass along…

• Learn how to say “please” and “thank you” in the local language.  I think people appreciate your attempt.  An interesting phenomenon here is that when I say “takk” or “merci” or the “thank you” equivalent in whatever language, the person typically says “you’re welcome”.  I’ve noticed this in many countries and it amuses me every time.  
  

• While you’re there, GET OUT!  Do not eat Marriott room service every night.  Don’t stick with TGI Friday’s (sorry, Jason).  Try the local and/or favorite foods.  If they don’t have an English menu, someone will generally translate for you.  In this case, don’t be picky!  Don’t make them spend 15 minutes trying to explain ingredients in English.  Just pick something that sounds interesting and go with it.  Cold salmon with potato salad.  Sounds great.  Done.  (this is one of my favorites in Sweden)
  

• One of my favorite things to do during international travel is “Running as Sightseeing”.   I will take a good look at Google maps (obviously after inquiring about safety and in some countries, acceptability of a woman alone in public), find an interesting park or a street or path and go for a run.  I run with my iPhone, stopping to take pictures whenever I see something interesting.  Sunday morning I had about an hour to spare in Bergen, Norway before my train.  I seriously considered snuggling into my couch and working on my weekly project update.  Instead, I hauled myself up & out and had an awesome sightseeing excursion.  I ran up the winding streets of the high fjord walls and experienced beautiful views over the city, as well as everyday houses that you or I might live in.  I could have glimpsed some of this on a tourist excursion, but even better that I did it on my own two feet.
  

So next time you travel internationally, get home soon, but while you’re there, do whatever you can to experience life in that country!


(below: snapshots of Bergen, on the west coast of Norway)

At the recent CSCMP Global Conference in Denver, the 2nd day ended with a panel on network design.  The 30 or so attendees were approximately split between network design professionals and companies who might need their services. 

Today, I thought I'd elaborate on an interesting topic posed by someone from a company young in network design.  She asked "Why do I need a fancy network design tool?  I have some SQL-savvy guys and they have Excel."  Some network design professionals may scoff at this question, but I think this is a great topic to explore. 

So why should a network design team grow into using a network design tool instead of using Excel spreadsheets?  Well, maybe you shouldn't.  I know network design pros that don't believe in using commercial applications.  They feel that a combination of Excel and some add-on tools for geocoding, distance calculations, maybe a linear programming solver, etc. is more flexible and quicker than a commercial tool.  I wouldn't go this far myself, but there is a time and place for Excel analysis. 

Several years ago, I built an Excel model and associated Mappoint project to determine the optimal location of local delivery centers for a major metro area.  I was able to try various combinations of 1-2 delivery centers using my Excel model to evaluate the trade-offs between delivery cost and real estate cost.  For example, is it better to site the delivery center in a low-rent real estate neighborhood and have more "windshield" time, or in the transportation-optimal, but higher-cost real estate area?  As long as the need was for 1-3 local delivery centers, the Excel model was adequate.

The benefits of Excel modeling are:

• Anyone who does analysis - financial, supply chain, transportation - knows how to use Excel and is equipped to build a model
• Excel models are quick to build and unless they use obscure Excel functionality, anyone can understand them
• Nearly every employee of every significant company has Excel on their desktop.  Commercial network design tools can cost $100k or more to purchase.
• If you have a small number of on/off decisions (1-2, maximum 3), Excel may be your quickest, most practical choice.
  

So what's not to like about Excel?  Excel breaks down in some areas:

• There's an art to building Excel models and there are no standards.  Give 5 people a business model to build and you’re likely to get 5 completely different Excel models
• Building and evaluating “what-if” scenarios can be challenging because it's difficult to build a scenario framework in Excel.  You typically end up having multiple sheets or workbooks to represent different scenarios.  Consider how hard it will be to maintain 15 nearly (but not exactly!) identical Excel models, one for each “what-if” scenario.
• But the following are two significant reasons you may want to consider moving to a commercial network design tool at some point.
• Excel models do not easily allow you to consider facility throughput capacity.  Let's consider that local deliver center example again.  We can pretty easily build an Excel model for a metro area and give the model the ability to choose the closest delivery center for each customer.  Sum up the customer deliveries for each delivery center and you have the projected facility throughput.  Uh oh... what happens if the sum for one of the facilities is greater than what the existing or potential facility can handle?  Play around with this a bit if you don't believe me, but in Excel, it becomes - choose your term - challenging or painful - to try to model capacity on facilities. "For this customer, choose the closest delivery center, except when delivery center is over capacity, in which case consider whether this customer is closer to the delivery center than other customers..." …you get the picture.  You are out of Excel's league for most capacity-related analyses.
• Excel is DESCRIPTIVE.  Commercial network design tools are PRESCRIPTIVE.  Excel will describe what the output will be given a set of inputs.  Commercial network design tools will take your input costs, network structure and constraints, and recommend the optimal product flow path, facility locations, and other network opportunities. This is where commercial network design applications can really drive value.  Because they're based on a math model of the network, their optimization isn't dependent on people's ideas, which can be limited by the way things have always been done.
  

Next blog entry, I'll dig into this last point in some more detail...


Also posted as a guest blogger at UltraShipTMS Supply Chain Collaborator blog.