Inspired by creating a well-oiled and satisfying business machine, Stewart Dunsmore, Senior VP, Lead Logistics Solutions at Kuehne + Nagel, says he has a passion for supply chain and for designing solutions within multiple industries. At CES’ Consumer Electronics Supply Chain Academy (CESCA) on January 9 in Las Vegas, Dunsmore will be co-presenting with Ray Young, chairman of WebConcepts for a session titled, “Source-to-Shelf Optimization: Intelligent Retail Inventory Management.”

He’ll be addressing the specific needs of the CE industry at the conference, after having saved the day in London, where his most recent challenge was to design a deployment solution to make sure the pubs in the United Kingdom don’t run out of beer. Dunsmore, said, “I’ll make sure those guys have their pints on the weekends when they’ve been running out.”

Whether it’s suds or consumer electronics, for Dunsmore it’s a matter of designing a business process, a replenishment process, and collaborative planning between productions, consumption, and replenishment. He studies how the product is flowing in the market presently and engages tools, business processes, and data solutions to increase efficiency, improve the visibility, and reduce the amount of inventory in the supply chain.

Dunsmore has corporate responsibility for one of the biggest supply chain companies in the world, Kuehne + Nagel, where he is responsible for all the business development activities for the companies Lead Logistics group, that includes 4PL, Aftermarket, Supplier and Inventory and Supply Chain Technology solutions. Kuehne + Nagel provides a complete services suite utilizing its global infrastructure across multiple markets.

Young and Dunsmore will talk about their two companies’ synergies in a Motorola case study for their session. Young will discuss the replenishment side of the shelf and Dunsmore will cover everything from distribution back to the factories that produce the products. “We will talk about how we take demand replenishment from the shelf, feed that information back into the distribution network, then feed that back into manufacturing,” said Dunsmore.  

For the Motorola case study, their challenge is no different than similar consumer electronics companies, meeting dynamic market changes and aligning the appropriate inventory to demand, gaining access to immediate consumption from the customers in order to produce the right product for the marketplace. The two will discuss managing that inventory and the touchpoints that inventory moves through in the supply chain.

The main concepts include: visibility to information, visibility to an automation of demand replenishment, and an automated IT interface to be able to tie the two trading partners – customer and seller – together.

For Dunsmore, the first step is to design the business process. “From the business process we design the data flows,” he said. “We have to understand the customer’s environment. We have to understand the supplier’s environment. We then create and apply the demand replenishment algorithm to that business process”