Ellery's Essays

How Many Depots Does Your Business Need?

The large consumer goods company where I used to work as shipping manager had a central warehouse which served customers via distributors in different regions of the country. My former boss boasted then that the company saved plenty of money from not having depots.

A company that sells laptops & printers utilises a 3^rd party logistics partner (3PL) to deliver to customers around the Philippines. The 3PL has depots in the country’s three (3) major cities and hires truckers & couriers to ship to customers.

A large beverages corporation had like ten (10) bottling plants all over the country. The corporation also had depots in just about every province. Bottling plants would send finished products to the depots which in turn served customers in their assigned territories.

The need to have warehouses or depots differs from enterprise to enterprise. The following are some factors that determine whether your enterprise needs a storage facility, distribution centre, warehouse, or depot:

Inventory: how many items or SKU’s do you intend to sell?
Density: how many and where are the customers you plan to sell to?
Demand: how much sales do you foresee from these customers?
Accessibility: how easy would it be to ship merchandise where the customers are?
Availability: Are there places and spaces near your customers where you could buy, build, or lease depots?
Function: what specifically will your depots do other than store, receive, & ship products (e.g., repacking, processing orders, retrieving & disposing customer returns, quality inspections)?
Risk: What are the risks of setting up depots at certain locations?
Cost: How much will it cost on top of the investment & cashflow needed?

Answering these questions is the easy part. The hard part is putting them all together to come up with a rationale for deciding how many depots you’d need and where to put them.

A fast-track method to figuring that out would be to identify and compare possible scenarios.

For example, one could compare the three (3) different examples I laid out above:

One Warehouse (Centralised)

The consumer goods company closed its provincial depots and concentrated shipping and inventories from one (1) central warehouse at the Philippine capital, Manila.

The company significantly reduced overhead expenses from the removal of the depots, but still had to shoulder freight expenses for direct shipments to distributors & customers in the provinces. Market share also dropped in some areas as distributors prioritised denser population centres than customers in remote areas of the country.

In short, the transition from a depot network to a centralised one resulted in lower supply chain costs but lower delivery reliabilities to customers.

2. Three (3) Depots (Regional)

The 3PL service provider for the company selling laptops & printers had three (3) depots located at the Philippines three (3) major cities. The Philippines has three major island groups: Luzon, Visayas, & Mindanao. Manila was the company’s depot for Luzon. Cebu City was the depot for the Visayas and Davao City was the depot for Mindanao.

All of the company’s products, which were imported from abroad, were received at Manila which then passed some of the products to Cebu and Davao.

The 3PL had staff and freight carrier contractors at each city who processed orders from customers at regions the respective hubs covered.

The company paid for freight expenses to ship products to the depots and also shouldered 3PL service charges for the operations of the depots.

Speedy deliveries to customers were made possible by the availabilities of products at the depots. Most customers were dealers & retailers located at Cebu, Davao, and not-too-distant urban centres such that deliveries were fast and most of the time, complete (assuming there were enough inventories).

3. Multiple Depots (Network)

The beverages company dealt with very high demand volumes all over the country. Hence, it was elementary to set up bottling plants at several urban centres as well as depots in just about every province.

High turnover and the company’s less than twenty (20) SKUs made it simple for the company to keep high stock levels and ensure availabilities to customers.

Costs and accessibilities, however, varied from depot to depot such that freight expenses would be astronomical at more remote locations even as rent and salaries would be lower than at cities. Scenarios allow companies to lay out quantitative matrices for the factors I mentioned above. One could put numbers & descriptions for every factor. Managers or industrial engineers could calculate probabilities of risks, compute statistics for on-time & complete deliveries, forecast customer demand per geographic area, budget transportation expenses, and estimate working capital needs for inventories.

Scenarios allow companies to lay out quantitative matrices for the factors I mentioned above. One could put numbers & descriptions for every factor. Managers or industrial engineers could calculate probabilities of risks, compute statistics for on-time & complete deliveries, forecast customer demand per geographic area, budget transportation expenses, and estimate working capital needs for inventories.

The sample matrix above would be more effective if engineers & managers could substitute numbers for the descriptions for each respective factor per scenario. Executives would get a better handle on what each scenario would entail on top of what benefits each would bring.

Some executives try to be straightforward in setting up depots. They decide on either one (1) depot or several depots, using subjective rationale such as reducing costs, simplifying operations, or delegating customer services to individual distribution centres. They discover later that benefits don’t materialise and what looked simple turns out to be more complicated.

Planning how many depots may seem simple until one realises there are more than a few factors to consider. It’s not just cost or service but also risk, accessibility, what the depots’ roles would be, and how much potential demand there could be that may be what really determine how successful a depot would be in contributing to a company’s success story.

Find Ellery

Central vs. Depots: A Case of a Seemingly Straightforward Solution to a Seemingly Straightforward Problem

My boss at the consumer goods corporation in the Philippines where I worked a long time ago told me the company didn’t need warehouses in the provinces. A central warehouse in the national capital, Manila, would be enough.

The field salespeople in the provinces disagreed. Having provincial depots assured on-hand inventories of finished products for the salespeople to sell to customers.

My boss argued that the central warehouse could ship directly to the company’s distributors, who in turn could serve customers in their respective territories. Depots, therefore, would be redundant.

The salespeople countered that their customers would resent being served by distributors instead of by the company. Customers would fear that they would lose the low-price deals they had grown accustomed to getting from the company.

The company’s executives favoured my boss’s argument and within a year, the provincial depots were gone. A new central warehouse shipped to distributors, who saw their businesses expand tenfold. Product distribution, however, was iffy, as some provinces reported lower market shares for some brands due to chronic delays in deliveries.

The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands. Transportation relied on inter-island shipping and aircraft to ferry passengers and cargo to provinces. It seemed sensible to set up warehouses in provinces as it took freight carriers about one to two weeks to transport merchandise.

The consumer goods company, however, had distributors covering just about every province. The distributors were willing to put in more capital to serve customers like supermarkets in their respective areas. The company’s executives saw the logic in shipping products directly to the distributors, which would make the provincial depots unnecessary.

A few years after the transition to the centralised warehouse set-up, the distributors saw their businesses grow. They, however, complained that their orders, especially for best-selling fast-moving products, were rarely served completely and on time due mainly to the long transit times from the central warehouse to the provinces.

Meanwhile, savings the company got from eliminating provincial depots were partly offset from higher lease payments for the additional space the central warehouse required. And because the central warehouse was located not too near to the company’s manufacturing facilities, the company had to shoulder expenses shuttling products between sites.

All in all, not much really changed in terms of expenses and customer service for the company. The distributors, on the other hand, turned out to be the big winners from the wealth they got from added business.

Straightforward strategies don’t necessarily translate to straightforward benefits. My boss thought a central warehouse would lead to real savings and more efficient distribution of products. It didn’t.

Many executives tend to ‘shoot first and ask questions later,’ that is, they get a seemingly bright idea which they in turn implement via delegating the task to subordinates. They stick to their beliefs that their good ideas will lead to significant business improvement. They don’t first define what problems they’re trying to solve nor do they analyse the costs & benefits of their ideas.

My boss and his superiors didn’t clearly define what they wanted to accomplish by eliminating depots and centralising outbound logistics at a large Manila warehouse. There was no formal report or study outlining what their objectives were. Everyone thought it was a good idea consistent with the company’s thrust to reduce costs without sacrificing shipments or customer services.

How many depots did the company need? That was the question which the company’s failed to ask and answer.

Subsequent questions which my boss and executives also failed to ask and answer were:

How would the company make available products to consumers (not customers who were distributors or supermarkets but the final end-users) in the centralised warehouse scenario?
How would the company restructure the transportation of products to preserve, if not improve, productivity and customer service?
How would the company receive and serve orders from distributors, especially the ones who will see their territories expand and their selling volumes increase?
What changes in systems, procedures, and resources would be needed to transition from a multiple depot structure to that of a centralised warehouse?

The transition the company went through from the multiple depot structure to a centralised warehouse was rough. Facilities and equipment were lacking the first few weeks after the central warehouse opened. Truckers did not know where to go and got lost finding the warehouse. It took a while for the warehouse’s local area network (LAN) to be set up which led to delays in the processing of orders.

My boss still boasted the central warehouse was a success; never mind he wasn’t around those first few tough days to experience the transition. And never mind that the company didn’t realise much in savings or productivity improvements.

On hindsight, I believed the company would have saved more money and have become more productive if my boss and the executives thought their ideas through before jumping hastily into a centralised warehouse scheme.

But as this anecdote is much in the past, it’s become a case study I’ve used repeatedly in training supply chain managers in thinking how to improve their distribution systems & structures.

And avoid the pitfall of implementing seemingly straightforward solutions to seemingly straightforward problems.

Find Ellery

Seeking Success from Order-to-Delivery Systems

There I was. The shipping manager of a multinational consumer goods corporation. Pending orders were piling up. Sales & marketing managers were calling, asking, and following up why shipments weren’t arriving at stores.

The manufacturing lines were running. The warehouse was full. The shipping department was loading trucks. Why weren’t orders being served?

There was a new order-to-delivery billing system that was just installed. The system required that manufacturing departments encode what they produced before finished goods could be entered as inventory. The shipping department could only ship finished goods that were ‘available’ in the inventory database.

The manufacturing departments, however, weren’t encoding their production fast enough. There were finished goods in the warehouse which were there, but the shipping people couldn’t retrieve and ship until the manufacturing departments encoded them. Hence, while pending orders piled up, the finished goods needed to serve them weren’t yet ‘available’ on the inventory database.

I complained to the company’s information technology (IT) manager who was in charge of the system. She kept answering ‘she will look into it.’ After a few days, and after seeing the warehouse so full and pending orders just sitting there waiting to be served, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Using my managerial credentials, I overrode the order-to-delivery system’s program to assign finished goods to orders. To put it another way, I told the staff to retrieve the finished goods which were not yet ‘available’ on inventory but obviously there in the warehouse, allocate them to orders, and load & dispatch the items on trucks. I also authorised the staff to anticipate production coming from the manufacturing departments and have the warehouse forklifts load just-finished goods onto any waiting available trucks, even if inventories weren’t updated .

The company’s daily shipment volume immediately jumped as the shipping department loaded more trucks than days before. Pending orders shrank. Calls from salespeople and marketing managers decreased.

The IT manager, however, was furious. I had no authority to override the system, she said. She complained to her boss and to my boss. She threatened to take away my system credentials to override. I told her that if her system cannot keep up serving orders, I’ll use a manual typewriter if I had to. That got her even angrier. I didn’t care. What mattered was serving the orders.

How enterprises fulfil the demands of the markets they compete in depends a great deal on how they serve the orders of their customers. Enterprises need to get right their order-to-delivery systems.

How enterprises serve orders vary from business to business, industry to industry.

Traditional retailers such as supermarkets and shops display products on shelves, waiting for customers to see them, choose them, and pay for them at the check-out counters. Some, like hardware stores & fashion boutiques, wait for customers to inquire, examine, and test (e.g., tools) or try on (e.g., attire) before deciding to purchase.

Companies that mass-produce items like the multinational consumer goods corporations have salespeople to negotiate and sell to distributors & stores. Salespeople or customers themselves send orders to customer service & logistics officers who process and dispatch deliveries.

E-commerce marketplaces led by behemoths like Amazon and Alibaba sell & ship directly to consumers who click & pay for their orders on internet portals.

Some people will claim one order-to-delivery system to be better than another. Some will advertise or endorse state-of-the-art artificially intelligent (AI) information technology (IT) systems to automatically take care of serving orders.

The truth is how enterprises capture their customers’ clamour determines their order-to-delivery success. It’s not how efficient one’s logistics department is in delivering orders completely or on time. It’s not well-managed one’s inventories are. It is how the enterprise anticipates the needs of potential customers and plans for them.

When a multinational consumer goods corporation stock shelves of their retail customers with the right quantities of products consumers will buy, when a fashion boutique is able to show a walk-in customer the new dress that just got advertised, when a hardware store could a supplier to deliver the tools a contractor wants by the weekend, then respective enterprises could claim success in their order-to-delivery systems.

The order-to-delivery process is about knowing what customers may want, planning for it, and scheduling & executing the availability of products & services when customers decide & buy.

Success in demand fulfilment begins once there is demand, when enterprises successfully create demand from their target market.

Find Ellery

What is the Aim of Serving Orders?

The CEO of the consumer goods multinational put me on the hot seat.

“Why aren’t we serving these pending orders?” He pointed to the pages of computer printouts on the conference room table.

I didn’t understand why I was the only one there. Where was the chief supply chain officer or the logistics director? It was just me and him.

I was the shipping manager of a consumer goods company. I was in charge of serving the orders as we received them from the sales department. ‘Serving’ meant allocating or reserving inventories, picking products, loading them onto trucks, and invoicing & delivering to customers.

The CEO wanted to meet an immediate goal: meet the monthly sales target. He wasn’t out there to intimidate me (that would be flattering myself, I thought). I just found it perplexing that I was the only one in the room with him, trying to solve the problem of serving pending orders.

I answered his questions one by one from the printout. There’s not enough available inventory. Some inventories are still in-process or not yet turned over from production. Although we have been working overtime, some customers close at the end of the day so we could only deliver the day after.

The CEO wasn’t satisfied, of course. He cited the need to meet revenue targets so the company could meet financial goals. Not serving orders fast enough was therefore not acceptable.

The CEO didn’t scold me, but I got the message. But there’s only so much I could do. At the end of that long day, he dismissed me.

The next day, I asked the shipping crew to continue working overtime so that we could load & dispatch as many trucks as possible. I personally took over the tracking and allocating of inventories to orders as my office staff printed out pick lists quickly so my warehouse team to retrieve items & load them on the trucks.

The shipping department was able to dispatch the volume needed for the company to meet the monthly sales target. We even beat it. The CEO congratulated the sales & marketing teams. He never did once mention the shipping department.

For supply chain professionals, fulfilling demand by serving orders is a paramount task. It’s how they define success in operations.

Enterprise executives, however, don’t necessarily share the same sentiment. They’d argue for the bigger picture of meeting strategic goals like sales targets, increased market share, and higher profits. Serving orders is an enabling objective; it’s not the end-all aim.

Many supply chain professionals, therefore, have trouble reconciling their employers’ strategic goals with the supply chain’s reason for existence, which is to productively fulfil demand.

When supply chain professionals fulfil demand, they contribute to the success of the supply chains they are part of. They also contribute to the success of the enterprises they work for.

Conflicts arise when the enterprise executives prioritise their goals versus that of the supply chain’s purpose. There were instances, such as in the example of my experience as the shipping manager, executives would prioritise shipments even if it meant sacrificing complete on-time deliveries to customers. Executives would tell supply chain managers, for instance, to ship the larger orders first before those with smaller quantities.

There shouldn’t be any conflict between the goals of enterprises and the supply chains they are part of. If there is any, it’s likely rooted in gaps in productivity. The more productive enterprises serve orders, for example, the closer enterprises would attain their basically higher-end goals such as increased revenues and greater market share. Enterprises benefit when supply chains are productive.

Enterprise executives have come to recognise the importance of supply chains but must figure out that serving orders is not only an enabling task towards meeting their enterprises’ goals but also it is a key part in the supply chain’s raison d’être, which is demand fulfilment.

Find Ellery

Don’t Underestimate an Old-Fashioned Manual Inventory System

Ben (not his real name) was the warehouse-in-charge person at a printing press company. His job, as the title suggests, was to receive, store, and issue materials and products going to and coming from the printing press’s production lines.

Ben tracked the inventories of items via his Daily Warehouse Status Report (DWSR). It essentially was a sheet which showed the beginning inventories, quantities of items received, quantities of items issued, and ending inventories.

And he did it all by hand. No computers. He did most of his counting and computing with an old calculator.

The company’s information technology (IT) managers tried to replace Ben’s DWSR with a desktop computer networked to the company’s accounting system. They told Ben that the new system would be real-time, that is, company stakeholders could immediately update themselves on inventory balances as soon as Ben keyed in transactions on the computer.

IT managers also installed radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on items so that inbound and outbound items would automatically be recorded into the integrated inventory information system.

Sales, production, and accounting staff, however, still called Ben to ask about inventories. Ben’s figures on his DWSR worksheet remained the go-to reference for the company’s departments’ inquiries on inventories.

Field sales would confirm product availabilities from Ben. Production supervisors would rely on Ben’s inventory records of ink, paper, & packaging materials prior to finalising their printing machines’ schedules. Accountants would double-check production & purchasing reports with Ben’s DWSR.

The printing press IT managers could only scratch their heads. Why did staff trust Ben’s DWSR more than they did the computer system?

Investigation from a 3^rd party consultant revealed some possible reasons:

IT and management assigned a staff employee other than Ben to record & check transactions on the computer while Ben continued to use his trusty DWSR. The consultant discovered that Ben’s DWSR was updated as soon as items were received or issued; the staff employee didn’t update transactions as fast as Ben did.
The staff employee had difficulties keeping up with transactions as RFID scanning of items often took longer versus Ben’s manual counting & confirmation of production receipts & delivery dispatches. In many instances, the warehouse staff person had to rescan items because of difficulties in reading the RFID tags.
The staff employee also encountered items that had erroneous item codes. The staff employee was busy half the time looking for the right item codes to record into the computer. Ben recorded items as per their descriptions and via his long years’ familiarity with the printing press’s products & materials. If he was receiving new materials or products he didn’t recognise, he’d go and ask the printing press’s marketing or R&D departments to identify them.
The computer system also wasn’t caught up with what materials or products were allocated respectively for the printing press’s production lines or customers. Printing press operators would compete for materials like paper & ink especially if there were rush jobs. Ben would avoid allocating all key materials to one production line or available product to one customer; instead, he called department heads for guidance on how much to allocate to who or where. Meanwhile, the computer system’s staff employee was clueless on how to allocate.

The IT department didn’t immediately accept the consultant’s findings as they went through a stage of denial that an old-fashioned manual DWRS handled by a not-so-computer-literate senior employee could upstage a state-of-the-art integrated information system.

The printing press company continued to rely on Ben and his DWSR despite the grumblings from the company’s IT department or anyone else for that matter.

What could be the lessons managers could learn from this almost real-life story?

The following are some candidates:

Define the problem before selecting, purchasing, & installing a system as a solution.
Clarify thoroughly the success criteria for whatever system you aim to install.
Examine a system’s present-state to not only identify deficiencies but also understand underlying benefits you may not want to sacrifice.

New technology systems don’t always beat old-fashioned processes.

Find Ellery

Inventory: When It’s More of a Problem Than It is an Asset

Inventory consists of items owned by enterprises and which flow through supply chains. Items include raw & packaging materials, ingredients, parts, components, assemblies & sub-assemblies, work-in-process, and finished products.

People aren’t inventory nor are equipment or assets which enable the transformation, storage, handling, or conveyance of items.

Inventory typically also does not include operating supplies, spare parts, and office supplies. Anything that does not become part or added into a product or service is not inventory, although some financial professionals categorise them as a separate type. (Accountants classify some operating supplies, spare parts, and operating supplies as assets, until they convert them to expenses when allocated and used).

Inventory in enterprises’ balance sheets are assets, but many executives don’t consider it as such. They pretty much prefer that inventory be liquidated to cash, which they believe would be much more useful. (Cash is king, as some say).

Inventory, unlike cash or current assets (e.g., stocks, bonds, securities), does not earn interest or increase in value while sitting still. Instead, inventory incurs costs from the need of managing the tangible items which make it up.

Inventory Management includes the receiving, keeping, storing, securing, handling, conveying, recording, reporting, dispatching, and transportation of items under its purview. It also includes the mitigation of risk of loss of value of items from instances of damage, obsolescence, pilferage, and degradation.

Managers from sales to operations see inventory as a requirement. Inventory provides an immediate reference for salespeople to assure customers of available finished products. Manufacturing managers rely on inventory to supply materials for continuous production and avoiding costly shutdowns. Logistics managers depend on inventory to deliver pending orders completely and on time.

Because many financial executives and sales & operations managers have different opinions when it comes to inventory, such as from respectively wishing there were very little of it to there being as much of it as possible, enterprise conference rooms would be scenes of debate as to the strategies of managing it.

Inventories would swing low during economic downturns and likely climb when there are demand upticks. Importers of merchandise such as toys and home décor brought in many container loads of goods from China to the United States in 2019 only to be caught with excess stocks when the CoVID pandemic struck in 2020. When their inventories shrunk by 2022, the same importers rushed shipments to meet expected higher demand. Enterprises arbitrarily adjusted their inventory strategies depending on the times.

They also switched their schools of thought from the Lean or Just-In-Time concepts of keeping almost no inventory to the Just-In-Case principle of having buffer inventories to minimise risks from unexpected events (e.g., overnight announcements of higher international tariffs).

As much as sales & operations managers agree to the need of inventory, they would give in to the financial executives’ desire to not to have too much of it. For managers with experience in whatever function, managing inventory is a constant challenge given what all the work & investment one must put into it.

Inventory, thus, is a problem, more than it is an asset.

What should one do about inventory? How does one formulate an ideal management strategy for it?

How does the enterprise reduce it without sacrificing service and availability to promise complete & timely deliveries to customers?

On one hand, the solution lies with whatever operations strategy an enterprise undertakes. If customer service is paramount, the enterprise must, together with its partners (i.e., vendors, customers, 3^rd party service providers), prioritise sufficient levels of inventories at various stages of the supply chain to ensure there would be enough stock to guarantee deliveries of products & services.

If the enterprise seeks lower costs and maximum cashflow, then managers should work toward increasing efficiencies via higher production & shipment volumes while negotiating with customers to increase order quantities and accommodate longer delivery lead times. Doing such would allow enterprise managers & partners to move merchandise in larger ‘batches’ while reducing stocks on hand. Enterprise executives could also limit the number of products they’d sell to minimise how much they’d need to keep on hand.

On the other hand, supply chain engineers (SCEs) could improve systems & structures to streamline inefficiencies in operations which in the first place could be root causes for why there are inventories.

Rationalising how inventories are managed such as using an ABC system and improving inventory record accuracies are two (2) examples where SCEs could help.

But first things first, executives & managers need to recognise that carrying out any strategy towards inventory is just as much an engineering undertaking as much as it is a job of management.

When it comes to supply chains, one enterprise cannot manage inventory alone. Nor can an enterprise improve inventories by itself. Managers would need engineers to re-structure operations and set up systems for the sake of garnering more productive benefits from inventories.

Inventory is made up of items kept and moving through supply chains. Accountants categorise inventory as an asset but executives see it more as a subject included often in strategic planning.

But management alone won’t fix the chronic challenges of inventory, supply chain engineers could help by improving systems & structures which govern it. Executives just need to realise that inventory is a problem engineers could fix and improve on, with potentially productive benefits.

Find Ellery

What Makes a Supply Chain Visible?

This is the third (3^rd) time I’m correcting myself regarding Supply Chain Visibility. I erred in my first essay published on June 01, 2020, We Need Better Monitoring Systems, when I said: “two things comprise a monitoring system: visibility and guidance.” And I erred again in my second essay dated December 09, 2025, Supply Chain Visibility: Monitoring & Measurement, when I wrote: “when it comes to setting up a system of visibility, two features must be present: monitoring and measurement.”

What I had learned is that Supply Chain Visibility should have four (4) features; these are: transparency, monitoring, measurement, and guidance.

Transparency

Transparency seems self-defining. Isn’t it a synonym for visibility? But I disagree, it’s not.

Transparency is the opposite of opaque, which, by definition, is “impenetrability of light,” or “so obscure as to be unintelligible.” Transparency is, therefore, how much one can view and comprehend a particular object of observation, via how penetrable and intelligible that object is.

Transparency isn’t a question of not only being able to see something but also being able to observe it. It isn’t just something one can see through and through via a medium or window; it is about how discernible the characteristics of whatever it is one is examining.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the capture of data. It consists of the actions of sensing, detection, and tracking.

‘Sensing’ is the scanning or being aware of the status or conditions of items, resources, and tasks.

‘Detection’ is the identification of items or tasks. As the monitoring system seeks via its senses, it discovers, distinguishes, and identifies items of interest.

‘Tracking’ is the viewing of trajectories & trends of items or tasks via the data sensed and detected.

Effective monitoring depends on the performance of these three actions. It can’t be just one or two in the absence of another. One cannot monitor quality, for example, if the system watches production but does not detect defects.

Measurement

Measurement is the quantification and evaluation of data. It’s not enough to have systems that merely senses, detects, and tracks; the system must also be able to organise, gauge, compute, and distil data into information which would become useful.

In short, transparency displays the scene; monitoring delivers data; and measurement packages the information.

Guidance

Three (3) mechanisms comprise guidance: indications, alerts, and advice.

An indication is the pointing out of specific information, featuring things like trends and behaviours.

An alert is the raising of attention to information nearing or crossing preset limits or guardrails.

Advice is the offer of suggested or obligatory actions or commands in lieu of the level of alert.

Taking together these three (3) mechanisms, guidance is the bringing of attention and the laying out of options for decision and action.

In building an effective system of visibility, these four (4) features: transparency, monitoring, measurement, & guidance, must be present. Visibility in the supply chain would not be complete if one (1) feature is missing.

And thus, I hope I have described Supply Chain Visibility more completely.

What would be examples of Supply Chain Visibility systems that showcase these four (4) features?

Large global courier corporations employ tracking systems which show where packages are at any given time frame. These systems are transparent for managers to observe & analyse the flow of packages from their starting points to their destinations. Operations personnel & clients could also monitor where packages are in real-time. Managers and clients can use the monitoring data to measure performances of tasks along the packaging supply chain. Notifications & alerts would guide operations personnel in expediting deliveries and telling clients their packages have already arrived at their doorsteps.

Customers at a Chinese restaurant could watch chefs & cooks prepare their orders of xiao long bao dumplings through a transparent two-way mirror. Supervisors monitor & measure the performance of the cooks & chefs. Reports at the end of the day guide managers on quantities of ingredients used versus items sold.

These examples scratch the surface as there are many ways to enhance supply chain visibility. The challenge lies in how you and your peers, superiors, & partners (e.g., vendors & customers) define visibility in the first place.

It starts with defining what one wants but keeping in mind what the potentials are for such a system.

And I can tell you, there is much more to supply chain visibility. I know, it took me three (3) essays to get it.

Find Ellery

Both Hard Work and Luck are Essential to Success

There are self-proclaimed experts who would tell you to “do what you love” and “follow your passion.” They’d say that the financial rewards would come naturally.

I had been hearing these lines for years and I can tell you they’re hogwash.

What I did learn was that hard work and luck were essential to success. Not either one but both were needed.

Some may disagree, but that’s what I learned. Work hard and hope I get lucky along the way.

You don’t make money by waking up every morning at 4:00am to get a so-called daily headstart by checking your email or do morning calisthenics. You don’t get wealthy because you adopted a well-articulated vision & mission statement. And you don’t get rich because your parents or a rich friend loaned you money.

You succeed because you had what you thought are good ideas and you ran with them. You invented products and made available innovative services which made your ideas into realities. You figured out how to sell them. You didn’t stop when you had more demand that you could handle. You delivered, kept costs under control, and priced your products & services competitively. You were relentless.

You enrolled people whom you not only hired as employees but also labelled them as partners. You welcomed their input, worked with them in teams, but still solely made the decisions. You were a teammate, but you reminded them who’s boss.

And you did the same with customers, vendors, and investors. You were the leader of your enterprise, not them. You appreciated their support and their advice, but you steered your enterprise. There were times you spent sleepless nights thinking about scary things some people warned you about, but you always knew you were the true owner of your ideas behind the enterprise, and you determined its destiny.

The more successful you became, the more ‘friends’ appeared. And with ‘friends,’ came their clamour for your attention. Some would seek your company with the aim of getting a piece of your action. Some would ask for your time, your donation to a questionable ‘worthy’ cause, and some would outright ask for a sizeable cash hand-out. You would become wary, therefore, of the intentions of the people you meet and know.

You would judge who deserved your attention and who didn’t. You may have felt guilty at first for ignoring the latter, but you’d grow out of it and learn not to think twice. You knew when to care and not to care about what people said.

You get that one-way sacrifices which don’t contribute value-added results are not as worth it as win-win mutually beneficial relationships. You stand to benefit as much as your counterparts did. Seeking mutual benefit is not a sin. It’s a virtue.

You depended on luck and that meant watching out for opportunities. When opportunities did knock, you made sure to answer. The trick was to find out which were potentially rewarding and which weren’t.

I had deemed myself as a not-so-successful person. I squandered opportunities despite working hard with what I had. Relative to many successful people, I felt I didn’t make the cut.

But I also learned that it’s futile to compare myself to other people. I still have my ideas and it’s still up to me to work hard to make them successful realities given my simultaneously seeking luck from potential opportunities

In short, you’d find success from working hard and looking for luck. Not from taking advice from or rubbing shoulders with so-called experts you don’t really know or who don’t really care about you or your ideas.

If you do want me to suggest a slogan. Here is my favourite:

You can do it.

Find Ellery

Waiting for My Car’s Licence Plates—A Case of Urgency vs. Importance

I bought a new car on April 29. The dealer via the Philippines’ transportation bureau, the Land Transportation Office (LTO), gave me the registration papers twenty-seven (27) days later on May 26. The licence plates were finally released on June 17, twenty-two (22) days after the registration papers and forty-nine (49) days total from the purchase date.

The LTO bragged in September 2025 that new-car buyers could receive their registration papers & licence plates on the same day they purchase their automobiles.

The LTO, about the same time, announced that traffic enforcers shall cite and ticket motorists who drive vehicles without proof of registration and license plates.

A month later, the LTO said it was impractical to enforce the “no-plate, no-travel” policy, citing issues in the processing of registrations and deliveries of licence plates.

More than six (6) months later, the issues apparently remain unresolved. But never mind, as per the dealer’s sales representative, I could drive the car as long as I had the proof of registration.

To the dealer and to the LTO, the processing of registration of new automobiles and the releasing of licence plates is a problem, yes, but it’s not an urgent one. As buyers could drive their new cars even without licence plates, there is no significant inconvenience for the dealer’s customers.

A problem is urgent when one perceives external pressure to solve it. When I complained to the dealer’s sales representative that the registration was taking so long, the sales rep repeatedly followed up the staff in charge of coordinating with the LTO.

A problem becomes important when one believes that solving it will facilitate performance in meeting strategic objectives. I didn’t think the dealer felt the problem of late registrations and delayed licence plates was important. Given that the dealer had already sold me a new car and I paid cash for it, there would be little, if any, value in assisting me to get the new car’s registration & licence plates faster.

For the LTO, however, the delays in registrations & licence plate releasing could be considered not only an urgent problem but an important one.

It is part & parcel of the LTO’s mandate to ensure the registration of land transportation vehicles in the Philippines. Registration provides assurance that vehicles are legally obtained and operated & maintained in compliance to standards of public safety & environmental protection.

When there are delays in the registrations of vehicles, whether old or new, in which there would be motorists driving vehicles lacking proper registrations & licence plates, the LTO would be remiss in its mandate.

The problem of delayed registrations & licence plates, maybe not important to automobile dealers, would be important and urgent for the LTO leadership. It’s a problem that would need to be addressed and solved for the sake of the LTO meeting its strategic objectives.

Absent from this argument is the customer, who in this case is me. How important to the dealer and the LTO is my satisfaction for my buying the new car?

From this frame of reference towards the dealer and the LTO’s objectives, it seems my satisfaction wasn’t that important. Only if I did complain, maybe I’ll catch either one’s attention. But as long as I didn’t, I wouldn’t be posing a problem to anyone.

A problem becomes one either out of urgency or importance. Customer service becomes a problem depending on how much attention unsatisfied customers clamour for it or if leaders see it important enough to influence performance.

Find Ellery

Goodbye, Sky

My home’s solar panels don’t start generating until 8am every morning. A nearby high-rise building to the east of my home obstructs the rays from the rising sun, preventing my house’s roof-mounted solar panels from generating electricity.

The same happens at 4pm when another high-rise to the southwest blocks the sun. My home, therefore, only effectively harvests eight (8) hours of solar energy, assuming it had been sunny all day.

Environmental activists argue that climate change is the biggest threat to planet Earth.

I disagree.

I believe that the bigger threat is pollution.

There are different kinds of pollution. Air pollution, water pollution, land pollution, noise pollution, thermal pollution, and sky pollution.

The buildings that obstruct my home’s solar energy generation contribute to sky pollution. They not only block sunlight, but they also take away the view of the sky.

There was a time when I could set up a telescope on my house’s front yard at night and look at stars, planets, comets, meteorites, & nebulae. Now, no more. The high-rise buildings’ lights have drowned out the dark sky, and I’d be lucky if I could catch a decent glimpse of any heavenly object. It doesn’t help that numerous airplanes and satellites populate the night sky. The dark sky is no longer dark.

It also doesn’t help that air pollution blurs the sky many days in a year. Fine, that clouds come natural at certain times of the year but smog from factories and motor vehicles distorts the horizon every morning through evening.

And air pollution together with water and land pollution stinks, on top of making it hard to breathe. I pity the people who live near landfills, harbours, and creeks, which are the dumping grounds of trash.

I live in Manila and the sad realities of air, water, & land pollution are compounded by the noise of urban life. Cars honk, motorcycles rev without mufflers, stereo amplifiers blare, and people talk & sing loudly.

While climate change may be a concern for some nations, pollution in my opinion is the immediate problem, at least at where I live and for those with similar circumstances.

The irony is that it’s much more straightforward to mitigate pollution than it is to combat climate change. An effective fix for water pollution, for example, is to invest in sewage treatment plants. Incinerators would be an answer to reducing trash; of course, they’d have to have filters to avoid air-polluting particulates. Local law enforcement could manage the dins of noisy motorists & inconsiderate party animals.

And if city halls could just not issue building permits to high-rise developers at residential neighbourhoods, that would be a big help to prevent any more decrease of whatever’s left of the sky.

It is too bad that much damage had already been done and is irreversible. I think I’ll neither get a view of a clear horizon, a dark sky to see the stars, nor twelve (12) hours of sunshine & blue sky ever again.

Some people say I should just travel to places if I want to experience un-polluted vistas. But that’s not the point, is it? Pollution is an urgent threat but not an unsolvable problem. And unlike climate change, there are things people could do to alleviate it, if not solve it.

It’s futile, however, to salvage what is already lost.

Goodbye, sky.

Find Ellery