Analyzing supply chains at HP using spreadsheet models

To satisfy shifting customer demand for an evolving product offering, every manufacturing company must reconfigure its supply chain network periodically. The network can be simple or complex. It may include suppliers, factories, final assembly locations, and distribution centers. Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) Strategic Planning and Modeling (SPaM) team has helped company executives to analyze numerous supply chain networks using spreadsheets (with and without Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)), spreadsheets with add-ins, custom-written software programs, and packaged software applications. Spreadsheets with and without VBA and add-ins are the most frequently used approach for analyzing supply chain networks. The team employs many advanced spreadsheet and VBA capabilities. It also minimizes unnecessary modeling complexity wherever possible. In this paper, we review why and how we use spreadsheets to analyze supply chains and discuss some of the ways of overcoming their limitations.