Logistics and Supply Chain
The systems that plan, move and account for physical goods from order to doorstep. Every hard problem here comes from the same place: the goods are real, they do not roll back, and what the software believes is only ever an approximation of where they are.
Assumes you know: Distributed systems basics, especially eventual consistency and idempotency, Relational modelling and SQL, Some exposure to message queues or event streams
Overview
What this area actually covers
This is the software that decides what goods should exist where, causes them to be moved, and keeps an account of that movement good enough to bill, audit and apologise for. In practice: order management, warehouse management, transportation management, last-mile execution, track and trace, and the planning layer that sets how much stock to hold and where.
The boundary people get wrong is with e-commerce, which owns catalogue, pricing and checkout, everything up to the moment intent becomes a commitment. The two areas meet at available to promise, the calculation of what you can credibly offer given stock that is partly on a shelf, partly reserved for other orders and partly on a ship.
Three things get wrongly bundled in: manufacturing execution, which is the shop floor rather than the network; procurement, a commercial discipline that happens to emit purchase orders; and mapping, mistaken for the routing problem when it is only the distance matrix underneath it.
Where to go next
Now practise it
18 interview questions in Logistics & Supply Chain, each with the rubric the interviewer is scoring against.
- A port your inbound flow depends on becomes unusable for a fortnight. Walk me through what has to happen to the plans already in flight.
- A shipment has produced no scan events for eighteen hours. Is that a problem?
- Your reported forecast accuracy went up for two quarters and inventory and stockouts both got worse. How is that possible?
- How do you build customer-facing tracking out of raw scan events?