Articles and news about Logistic and Supply Chain
Distribution centers: types, cross-docking, picking and location
What distribution centers do, the types of warehouses, how cross-docking and picking work, and how to choose a DC location using the center-of-gravity...
Stockroom operations: receiving, storage, inventory control and paperwork
How a stockroom works: checking deliveries, assigning storage locations, cycle counting, inventory accuracy and stock requests—plus the difference bet...
Material classification and coding: from NSNs to barcodes and RFID
How to identify, code and catalog materials using standardized descriptions, NSNs and CATMAT, EAN-13 barcodes with check digits, and RFID.
Public consortia: how they work and make purchases
How Brazilian federal, state and local governments form public consortia, from agreements of intent and cost-sharing to service contracts, procurement...
Price registration, reverse auctions and public-private partnerships
How price registration agreements and piggybacking work, reverse auctions under Law 14.133, and PPPs: types, limits, deadlines and tendering.
Bidding exemptions, sole-source procurement, bidder qualification and government contracts
When the government can award contracts without competitive bidding, the 2026 exemption thresholds, required qualification documents and the rules gov...
Public procurement: Principles and bidding methods
What competitive bidding is for, the principles that govern it, who runs it, the five bidding methods under Law 14.133, and the stages of the process,...
Supplier selection, make-or-buy decisions and purchasing ethics
How to choose suppliers using total cost and a weighted scoring matrix, decide whether to produce in-house or outsource, find the make-or-buy break-ev...
Purchasing Planning, Supplier Registration and Evaluation
How purchasing fits into a company's plans, how to use the Kraljic matrix and register suppliers, and how to measure performance with OTIF, PPM and a ...
Purchasing: Its role, goals, structure and negotiations
What purchasing teams do, why every real saved goes straight to the bottom line, how the purchasing cycle works, whether to centralize and how to nego...
Inventory Management Review: Formulas, Concepts and an Integrated Exercise
An overview of inventory management covering key metrics, forecasting, costs, economic order quantity, safety stock, Q and P systems, ABC and XYZ anal...
Inventory Valuation: FIFO, LIFO and Weighted Average Cost
How to value inventory and cost of goods sold (COGS) using FIFO, LIFO and weighted average cost, with a worked inventory ledger and an explanation of ...
ABC and XYZ Inventory Classification
Learn how to build an ABC analysis based on consumption value, classify items by criticality (XYZ), and combine the two to decide how closely to monit...
Continuous-review (Q) and periodic-review (P) inventory systems
When should you reorder? Learn about reorder points, target inventory levels and safety stock in Q and P systems, with charts, a side-by-side example ...
Lead Time, Reorder Points and Safety Stock
When to reorder and how much extra inventory to keep: reorder points, service levels using the z-score, and safety stock when demand and lead times ar...
Economic order quantity (EOQ): how much to order at once
Where the economic order quantity formula comes from, why it holds up when the input data is imperfect, and how to decide what to order when a supplie...
Inventory costs: purchasing, ordering, holding and stockouts
What does it cost to keep inventory—and to run out? Learn how to estimate purchasing, ordering, holding and stockout costs, and how they add up.
Demand forecasting: weighted averages, exponential smoothing and least squares
Learn how to forecast demand by giving more weight to recent data, using exponential smoothing to adjust for errors, and identifying trends with a lea...
Demand forecasting: The last-period method and moving averages
Forecast horizons, demand components, seasonality indices, the last-period method, simple moving averages, and how to measure error using mean absolut...
Types of Inventory and How to Classify Materials
Raw materials, work in progress, finished goods, MRO, cycle stock, safety stock and seasonal stock: the types of inventory and how to classify materia...